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... 2020 JOURNAL JAN 1st: We celebrated in our now-traditional fashion last night: a decent champagne accompanied by a small bowl of blackeyed peas for luck; the annual firing up of our dust magnet TV so we can watch "Dinner for One" together via ChromeCast; a St. John's, Newfoundland clock displayed on said TV so we can celebrate New Years 2.5 hours early (hey, we're old). New Years is one of the few social rituals we celebrate anymore but several decades in the bar business does tend to leave an imprint... JAN 7th: In reference to the previous post: "Dinner for One, also known as The 90th Birthday (German: Der 90. Geburtstag), is a two-hander comedy sketch written by British author Lauri Wylie for the theatre. The German TV station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded it in 1963, in the original English, with a short introduction in German. It is an 18-minute black-and-white videotape recording, performed by British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden. It has become a tradition to watch it on New Year's Eve in Germany, and is the most frequently repeated television programme ever." -- via Wikipedia JAN 16th: Just as some people are color blind, I'm social blind. One of those spectrum things that tend to be awkward. A well-honed sense of self-depricating humor can be most useful in this regard. Glosses over many a faux pas. Worthless however with someone who is humorless... FEB 4th: I am now of the opinion that the optimal condition in life is lying in bed, covers over your head and drifting between dreams and wakefulness. All other possibilities are, to some degree, inferior. It's a good thing I never lived close to an opium den... FEB 6th: Ok, I'm a father-in-law now. Still haven't read the manual but will do my best. Just wing it I suppose, like always... FEB 15th: I've been deep in all things gopher for the past week, much to the neglect of other things including this journal. Finding real joy in using the simplest of tools to produce the results I want. For instance, I have always detested to-do lists but have discovered a "done list" is much more to my liking and definitely more informative. Just a simple running text file of things I have actually finished with forever... FEB 21st: Had my clerk training on the 19th for the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries. I was hand-picked as a volunteer by my wife, the precinct judge. The hardware was interesting, the software unremarkable and the legal entanglements daunting. Also scheduled a flu shot at the prospect of being in a small enclosed space packed with masses of people and having to handle documents and id's all day. Essentially like being lowered into a seething vat of Typhoid Marys. Oh joy... FEB 23rd: In reference to the previous post, there are several simple measures that significanly reduce the possibilty of transmission. For aerosol, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough and wash your hands afterwards. Ask others to do the same if necessary. Do not touch your face, especially eyes, nose or mouth, without washing first. This also applies to anything your hands or other hands have touched as well. Hands are the primary source of transmission and washing is your primary defense. Anti-baterial soaps have no effect on viruses other than to aid flushing them from your hands like other soaps. These practices should remain valid if the COVID-19 stuff goes pandemic, which it probably will... FEB 29th: Leap Day! Hopefully not into the void... MAR 4th: Worked Super Tuesday yesterday for the Democratic Party. Up at 4:30 AM and on site by 6:00 AM. Polls opened at 7:00 AM and closed at 7:00 PM. After tearing everything down and hauling all the important bits back to Georgetown (a 60 mile (100 km) round trip) we finally got back home slightly before 10:00 PM. Most of my time on site was spent explaining how the voting machines worked or helping voters deposit their ballots in an electronic ballot box. Essentially 12 hours constantly on the move, talking, helping and explaining with very few breaks. We and the Republicans ran well over 1000 people through the site in 12 hours and in some fashion I interacted with almost all of them. Essentially a Bataan Death March for an old guy like me. I had things hurting that I didn't even know could hurt. Never again... MAR 18th: COVID-19 seems to be really picking up steam in the US. It got everyone's attention when the stock market went down the tubes almost overnight. Frantic efforts afoot to shore up the economy with essentially band-aids that won't last even into the summer. Someone hit upon the brilliant idea of getting Trump to actually do something by convincing him that firing up the 1950's Defense Production Act would magically convert him into a "Wartime President". Donnie likes that sort of thing... MAR 31st: Settling into seclusion. No great change for me but a bit harder on Karen. Beginning to see every human and surfaces they may have touched or sprayed with their aerosol as a potential disease vector. Difficult since I've never been much of a paranoid. Pretty sure this is going to be a slow motion train wreck with lots of screams, handflapping, loud noises and casualties littered about for the next few months. And all you can do is watch in horror and try not to get any on you... APR 12th: Ah, Easter Sunday celebrated with nothing, as usual. The increased mass of humans at home fending and cooking for themselves has put a real strain on the supply chain. That, combined with the frantic hoarders, has made our usual grocery shopping online with Walmart a real adventure. To their credit, Wally has become much more current and accurate about those things in or out of stock. And this has driven us into previously unexplored venues. For instance, this evening we had a microwave packet of Coconut Jasmine Rice (Thai Hom Mali) from the Super Lucky Elephant brand in Thailand. Not nearly as garish as it sounds. Subtle and quite nice. It was a pleasant discovery. Thanks COVID-19... APR 18th: And now the whole thing is back on the web (again). Gopher is simple, perhaps too simple, and I'm not the least bit nostalgic over the dialup BBS look and feel. Once was enough for that. I have also put aside the pretense of creating a website for others. This one is for me but others are invited to poke around if they wish. And I really enjoy being able to invoke a single command to build the entire site in a second. Yep, I'm lazy... APR 23rd: Having done with gopher, I moved all my activity to the meta-arpa array on sdf.org where my website resides. Spent the morning updating all the instances here and on the web with the new email of every@ma.sdf.org. The old every@sdf.org is simply being redirected with a .forward file. And anything sent to either address pops up on my gmail as well... APR 27th: Well, almost done with gopher. Figured out a relatively painless method for using my gophersite as a mirror. All editing and changes are done on the website files and directories with only certain items transferred to gopher. Basically this is taking my periodically zipped backup stored on Google Drive and moving a copy to gopher and then doing a selective extraction. An extra minute or three at the most... MAY 9th: Yet another birthday so I've been at this journal for exactly one year. Much has changed in that year and practically none of it foreseen or particularly desirable (with a few notable exceptions). And the immediate future isn't looking terribly inviting either (again, with exceptions). But to quote the Immortal Fats Waller, "One never knows, do one?" And now time to scurry back into the hidey-hole... JUN 30th: I see I've been remiss and neglectful of this journal. Did some extensive reworking of my website, none of which was compatible with gopher, so back to the single platform again. Life has been a repetitive exercise around here, externally at least, but we both continue to pursue our interests and discover new things. The internet (not just the web) is a marvelous toy. Also a fairly safe vantage point to witness the disaster movie apparently being filmed around us. Much shaking of heads and muted sounds of exasperation in the household when one of us warily cracks open the news. I sense some sort of horrific crescendo in the offing, possibly with a rapid denouement... JUL 11th: There was never much doubt that Trump would eventually lose control and drive off into the tall grass. The only questions were how soon, how fast and would he make it all the way to the cliff. This might be a cause for some schadenfreude if we all weren't sitting in the back seat... JUL 25th: What a surprise. This website is mentioned and linked from: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html AUG 1st: Rather an unusual anniversary. We had our traditional Chinese but within the secluded bowels of our bunker. We gave a generous tip for the delivery. It was to be our 40th, the ruby, but neither of us was inclined to venture forth into the plague for jewelry. So we decided to follow Ringo's lead on delaying his 80th birthday until it could be properly celebrated in style. The champagne is still in the fridge... AUG 14th: A rather startling number: According to an NPR poll, a full 35% of my fellow citizens will refuse to be vaccinated even if there is a safe and efficacious one available for COVID-19. It's not every day that you get to watch natural selection in real time... AUG 16th: We ordered nectarines but got 3 pounds of mandarin oranges from Peru. Small, oblate, heavy and a brilliant orange. Peeled and seperated easily with a flick of the thumb. Seedless, laden with juice (hence the heaviness), sweet and sharp. A nice mistake... SEP 24th: Been wrapped up in Mastodon recently. An open-sourced, federated, geek-laden version of Twitter, but with way fewer twits. Yet another rabbit hole to explore. And every day is Groundhog Day while waiting for November 3rd to arrive. Ballots will start mailing the first week of October. Oh, and we just passed 200K dead. Gee, what a great year... OCT 8th: Did my civic duty for the next two years. Dropped my ballot in the mail. Now we get to wait. And abandoned Mastodon. While better than Twitter, that's an extremely low bar. Also actually enjoyed the VP debate last night because I didn't have to watch or hear it. Instead, I followed a thread on MetaFilter tracking the debate in realtime. It reached almost 300 posts. Far more informative and entertaining. Also far less infuriating... NOV 1st: Dutifully observed "fall back". Waiting dutifully for the Nov 3 electoral results. High hopes. High fears. Fully expect a Dem victory will result in a nightmarish 2.5 months to inauguration. Scorched earth. Destroy everything. Make them pay. One does not reject a malignant narcissist lightly. Just my current happy thoughts... NOV 7th: "The End of an Error" -- New York Magazine NOV 28th: One thing that seems to be slowly dawning on Trump is that just because he can say anything he wants, this does not transform into an ability to conjure anything he wants. And yet life and death go on in spite of his best (worst) efforts. Especially death it would seem, at least for the near term. A mere 54 days and counting 'til the inauguration. Still much mischief and damage to be done in the interim... DEC 12th: I'm rather looking forward to being bored for the next four years. Unremarkable displays of competence. The yawn-inducing functioning of a 'by the book' administrative organization. The dull business of sensible policies and reasonable proposals. Reporters nodding off during pressers. No longer cringing at the thought of checking the news. Not having to check the news in any case. Droning monotones explaining in far too much detail and precision things of little general interest. Sheer bliss... DEC 31st: Man, am I ever glad to put a final, demonstrative, stake-in-the-heart period on this smouldering turd of a year: 2021 JOURNAL JAN 1st: For our now normal New Years Eve: Chandon Brut, the annual firing up of the aged boob tube to watch "Dinner for One" together and a small amount of black-eyed peas (this year with corn muffins from scratch!) for luck. This is what counts as an elaborate ceremony and sacred rite around here. Yep, we're dull... JAN 7th: And of course our presidential putz attempts a putsch. And being a putz, it was a half-assed, half-baked and halfwitted attempt at a putsch. Here's to incompetency! JAN 7th: I predict there will soon be an new adjective to attach to a political opponent: trumpian. The horrors it might conjure could be quite effective with the proper audience... JAN 10th: Snow! Our last measurable snowfall was in 2017... JAN 15th: Our president, Donnie, is not particularly smart or capable at anything. But boy, oh boy, does he know how to hold a grudge. And there are apparently no lengths he will not go to for revenge and payback. Double. Triple. And, just our luck, this trait was a perfect fit with a sizable portion of the electorate that are still trying to win and litigate a war they lost over 150 years ago... JAN 21st: Well, we certainly have had a decade's worth of Wednesdays this month. The 6th was dominated my our homegrown, magical thinking Jacksonians attempting a G.I. Joe-clad re-enactment of the storming of the Bastille. Fortunately, in the end they proved as incompetent as their Fearless Leader. And now the consequences are deservedly raining down on their pointy little heads. On the 13th Fearless Leader entered the rarefied air of being impeached twice in a single term. And this one may stick, awarding the ultimate booby prize of being banned from federal office for life. The 20th's Inaugural was anything but normal. But given that the Black Plague was in town and the recent attempted putsch, not totally unexpected. And we still have the 27th to go. Here's hoping it will prove to be the best Wednesday in years by producing absolutely nothing newsworthy from Washington for an entire day... FEB 9th: Watch your step and don't mind the mess. Reconfiguring my website for the umpteenth time. Everyone needs a hobby. And in other news, Trump's senate trial began today. Gee, I wonder how it will turn out... FEB 22nd: [imported from a family Facebook post on Feb 20, 2021] Power restored this AM after slightly more than 110 hours without. First order of business was to brew coffee. We have our priorities straight. Now the waiting for water to reappear after 50+ hours. That's been off due to a broken main at the apartments that couldn't be addressed without electricity by the contractors. And the city water is off anyway. Catch 22-ish. This has been an interesting but not particularly pleasant change of pace. Walking about with every warm thing we own on inside. Sleeping under mountains of afghans. Raiding the bodegas with electricity for a dazzling array of junk foods that required neither heating nor plates. Tossing several hundred dollars of fridge/freezer comestibles that had begun smell like a dead moose. And thank goodness for the ancient technology of hurricane lamps. We're shabby, stinky and grumpy but, while it may be a bit premature, we're thinking of having tee shirts emblazoned with: "We Survived the Austin Ice Age"... [and as of this post, we are still waiting for water] FEB 24th: [also imported from Facebook] Status Update: Power and water restored (mostly). Armies of plumbers and electricians swarming over the apartments (our new property managers are a vast improvement over the prior lot). Some of the structures here are 4 or more decades old and sustained heavy damage. Ours, the newest, held up well it would seem. Our major loss was the coffee maker died but a replacement should show up at our door tomorrow from Wally-Mart. And I am currently sitting outside in my shorts, flip-flops and a loud hawaiian shirt on February 24th. Because Texas... MAR 16th: "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" Received my first vaccine jab today. Administered as a drive-thru in the parking lot of the Dell Diamond, a AAA baseball field in Round Rock. Mild to nominal side effects so far and no obvious mutations. But if they do occur hopefully they don't include tentacles. Back in 3 weeks for the follow-up. Disappointed they didn't give me a sucker though... APR 6th: Second vaccine today. Much busier than the first. The nurse administering the shot said they expected between 4000 to 5000 that day. And every one of them driving a car. Got out a map and measured the length of the line just to enter the site at about 3/5's of a mile along the shoulder of Highway 79. No lingering side effects so far except excessive sleepiness. And it should be fully efficacious in two weeks... MAY 9th: Two years since I started this journaling thing. Here's how I announced my birthday on Hacker News to a nice response: "As luck would have it, today is my birthday. I am now officially 72 years old. My approach to the inevitable is, while getting older is certainly no picnic at the park, it definitely beats the hell out of the alternative. So far at least..." JUL 3rd: And so now we're grandparents. Little Emilia made her way into the world this morning. We will do our best to make it an enjoyable and rewarding experience... JUL 25th: Somewhere floating around in the electronic ether is a photo of me holding a swaddled, pink, wiggly thing very gingerly in my arms. I appear (and am) very old and she very young, which is as it should be. This being alive business is just full of surprises... SEP 17th: Technically, I have not been neglecting this journal since all the days for the past year and a half under the plague have gone pretty much like this: wake up, put on a pot of coffee, go for a stroll, sit down and start futzing around on the computer, perhaps do a little (as possible) housework, take a nap, make and/or consume a dinner, more futzing before bed and all accompanied by classical music. Rinse and repeat. The notable exceptions were a week long polar ice storm and becoming a first time grandparent... DEC 31st: As a gift to myself I declare this journaling at an end. Happy New Year... --- every@ma.sdf.org ---