Done last week (20170107Su - 0113Sa)
I think I did quite a lot this week: some good debugging, a significant amount of writing (Meltdown and the Spectre of Speculation), some system administration (updates: see above; also getting my mirror drive back in operation), updated the project list, ordered a file cabinet and a shed, ...
My new schedule (see last week's Meta post in search of a keyword) seems to be working pretty well -- I've managed to practice guitar every day, and twice on most days. I also had a good singing lesson on Wednesday -- N was down in Seattle, so I invited g to come along in her place. Had a blast.
On the down side, though, I realized Friday that we sold the Starport in 2014, not 2013. That means that I won't be able to write off the proceeds from selling Rainbow's End, because it will have been less than four years since the last time I did it. That, in turn, mean that my tax bill this year will be even worse than I anticipated (and it wa already going to be bad, from having severely under-withheld). We put a lot of money into improvements on Rainbow's End, so the actual profit will be a lot less than it could have been. If I'm really lucky, it might even be a loss.
On the gripping hand, though, I've resigned myself to pulling money out of my IRA to pay for it, so I don't feel as bad about also pulling out what I'll need for the improvements to this house. But decades of stupid financial decisions have really taken their toll -- I'm something of a wreck, and will be until at least the middle of February. There's a reason why the tag for my finances is "trainwreck".
Notes & links:
0107Su * up 5am; ; @ A Real 'Very Stable Genius' Doesn't Call Himself One - The Atlantic (ysabetwordsmith) * make post with no name in Dog failed. ljpost also failed, on line 64. -> ljpost's problem was a missing semicolon on the line that tests for Access=local -> make fails on draft-or-entry-required -> name -> DEFAULT_NAME in .config.make * B1S1: weekly post; B1S2 guitar practice (Lord of the Buffalo, Millennium's Dawn, ...) * B1S3: debugging (see above), make extra workspace names clickable in xmonad * B1S4: unpleasant tasks (sorting papers); sysadmin: mirror drive on nova * make na@c-m forward to nr@f -> verified & somehow everything in must.do got left-justified. Apparently this happened after it was committed, so the actual changes are minimal. I blame the cats. catps-lock? * make sure mirror (cron job) is working on nova -> cron job present. Nothing has changed. % somehow I managed to work through lunch, not to mention not practicing guitar at 1pm # I note that there's a whole 'nother list of projects under =sometime. Not to be confused with ==sometime preferably this month. Swapped number of "="s. @ Chip Flaws 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' Loom Large Meltdown and Spectre \ these two sites are Meltdown and Spectre/ identical Cyberus Technology Blog - Meltdown good explanation of how the exploit works Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers - New York Times " on Tuesday, news of the Meltdown flaw began to leak through various news websites, including The Register, a science and technology site based in Britain. So the researchers released papers describing the flaws on Wednesday, much earlier than they had planned. " Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign • The Register -> Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs " Spectre allows, among other things, user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. Alternatively, it can be used by code to extract information from its own process. Imagine malicious JavaScript in a webpage churning away using Spectre bugs to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser's memory. " Vulnerability Note VU#584653 - CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks * guitar practice after dinner. Paper Wings, Wheelin', Rosie, Stolen Child, When I Go... * pick up kids (8pm ferry -- leave ~7:40) % both g and N mentioned that I seem to be less frazzled this week. N said that regular guitar practice may have something to do with it. * down 10:30 0108Mo * up 5:30; W=203.6; * 8:00 B1S1 guitar. mostly Lock-Keeper working on the barre chords. I keep having trouble with Bm/A, but it's really just a variant on Bm7. Shorten the barre to leave the A string open, and you've got it. * 8:30 B1S2 put "official" blog drafts in Journals * 9:00 start dinner (needs 8 hours in crock pot), clean kitchen, sweep under desk, back toilet, C's wastebasket, ... running laundry and dishes pending. -> dinner is actually specified as 8-10 hours, so should have been started at 8 rather than 9:30. Running it the first couple of hours on high. -> dinner came out well. * 10am writing: meltdown - finished around 3:30. Proofreading and printing about 4pm * 2pm guitar practice. Only went about five minutes and stopped because my fingers were starting to hurt. * SL 3-3.5 lbs brisket, ketchup, grape jelly, onion soup mix(?), mushrooms, sweet onions, chicken, coconut milk, swiss? cheese for quiche, eggs, cat food, lac milk, tofu, pretzel sticks and bits. @ posted mdlbear | Meltdown and the Spectre of Speculation 1654 words, give or take. @ siderea | [domesticity, psych/clin, Patreon] The Siderea Filing System * verified that nova was mirrored. One less thing to worry about. * reduce C's allowance to $100/week 0109Tu * up 5am; W=201.8; % piece of grit or something in my right eye. Ugh. Responded to the usual treatment, but very unpleasant and there's still (5:50) some residual scratchiness. @ Arboform - Wikipedia "liquid wood" - thermoplastic made from cellulose in lignin TECNARO GmbH - Arboform @ Meltdown (security vulnerability) - Wikipedia Spectre (security vulnerability) - Wikipedia Amazon AWS customers see slowdown after Meltdown patch - Neowin Microsoft's Spectre fix is apparently causing boot-up issues in some AMD PCs [Update] - Neowin * B1S1 guitar; a little short. Millennium's Dawn; QV (in G\capo5 and C -- the non- capoed version is needed if we want to sing it in C# or higher). . merge project lists (i.e. move stuff out of to.do) -> in progress; culling is also required. Check overlap with wibnif * j's laptop wasn't charging. Replaced the third party charger with a Dell. Not clear what the problem was -- defective charger or Dell being stupid -- but it works now. Fortunately I had one sitting around. Unfortunately I don't have any more. * Installing Windows updates on j's laptop. * moved thestarport.org from Public on nova; fixed remotes on nova and host. * set up apcupsd on nova -> having problems -> required a2enmod cgi : mirror - disk timing out, so unknown problem. -> fsck passed; we'll see. * finished putting j's cabinet together. : call rescheduling tomorrow's sleep appointment - provider out sick. C asked me for something while I was entering it; the combination used an inordinate number of spoons. @ Mushroom And Onion Quiche - Recipe - Cooks.com not very complete. But maybe. -> came out very well. (The directions didn't mention the mushrooms and onions; I put them in the pie shells and poured the rest of the mix on top of them. Worked.) @ Fire and Fury: President of Macmillan Responds in Memo to Trump's Cease and Desist Demand % I feel like I'm falling apart, and I don't know why. Low blood sugar, maybe? : 7ish - Ubuntu finally shipped their patched kernel. Updated Cygnus and Raven : 8ish very sleepy. 0110We * awake 3:30ish; never got back to sleep, though I did lie down for a half-hour at 5:30 * Up 4:30; W=201.8; * updated Raven, Blackbird, Blackroot. Attempted to update Windows on Raven; many of the updates fail persistently. Trying troubleshooter, which claims to have fixed them -> nope. -> yes, after the second or third reboot. Still a few missing, but it looks like the Meltdown fix succeeded : sleep clinic appointment moved to 2/5 & Teaching today because N has a class in Seattle. -> this means I'm on my own for singing lessons -> invited g * singing lesson: 5pm as usual -> taking g, since N is off at a massage class in Seattle -> Where the Heart Is, Lock-Keeper, October Country, Gentle Arms of Eden. Traded CDs $ $200 singing lessons @ How One Las Vegas ED Saved Hundreds of Lives After the Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History - Emergency Physicians Monthly (cellio) % 10ish sleepy 0111Th * up 5:30ish; W=201.8; shower * 8am guitar - about 10 minutes. - rest of the segment spent on family/self care * 9am try to figure out why posting mangled UTF-8 curly quotes. Can't find anything in the Python code in charm, but the journal's default encoding is utf-8. -> comparing locale ctype to "UTF8", should be "UTF-8" :P (10:45) * 15min: half an hour looking in the garage for the pedal for C' sewing machine. Found a box of _other_ stuff, e.g. the embroidery hoops, but not the pedal. -> that, along with the feet and other accessories, turned up in a box labeled "sewing table stuff" that was already in the house. :P * Shed ordered: AmazonSmile: Goplus Galvanized Steel Outdoor Garden Storage Shed 8.5x 8.5Ft $ OE $188 on HSX debit card File cabinet ordered, but it's out of stock. Bletch. -> eventually was able to find one at the Lynnwood store. Order# 9782434525 Item is 52x26.5x15 inches; Pick up at: 3011 196th Street Sw, Lynnwood, WA 98036 % severely overloaded, between *four* chat sessions, confirmations ending up in spam, website not saying it's out of stock until after you place the order, and trying to look up the swimming instructor's number that C misplaced, ... Not doing well. % Someone telling me "it's ok" invariably gets the immediate response, "no it's not." *always* % It shouldn't take me three hours and this much mental exhaustion to place two orders and look up a phone number, should it? * guitar, ~20min. Went into back bedroom and closed the door; the cats didn't seem to mind, and they didn't say anything, either. * Thursday: curried chicken (tika or something like) -> Penzey's Maharaja curry powder; sweetened condensed cocoanut milk - too sweet? not for Colleen, but g didn't like it. marginal for me % a bit lightheaded? Sleepy? Low blood sugar (unlikely, since I just ate) % the hernia has been bothering me all day. Need to see if something got dropped. : Ticia went into the cat-lock briefly, but came out when I called her. * Down 11ish 0112Fr * up 5ish; W=202.8; @ Birdcage liners - Joel on Software twitter and facebook @ Elm, Functional Front-end Development and Why You Should Care | Changelog Probably already have a link to this; just clearing tabs @ Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface | Bartosz Milewski @ Liquid web template language One pass, conditionals but apparently no defines, so not Turing complete used in Jekyll @ Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers | Guardian * 15min: clearing tabs -- got rid of one of the Chrome windows in WS6. * B1S1 guitar: Middle-Sized Bear, Stuff That Dreams are Made Of, Ship of Stone * B1S2 reading Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface | Bartosz Milewski : call from someone at Staples re: my negative review. Verified that Tuesday is the last possible day for pickup; said that company policy is that if I didn't designate an alternate when I placed the order, there was no way to do it after the fact. -> called the Lynnwood store; (manager) Justin said that they'd give me a courtesy call after IDing the person picking up. # there's a form of crossposting going on: completing a project gives rise to identical (or at least similar) completion entries in both to.do and must.do. The exact same thing happens between to.do and a menu. -> the obvious thing to implement is an emacs function that takes a selected item and appends it to today's to.done * a few minutes of guitar. Noodling, partly in E; trying to remember Guilty Pleasures and mostly succeeding after a while. Not the riffs, though. * Friday: leftovers @ mdlbear | [I wrote a thing] xmonad (part 1 of several, incomplete) mdlbear | [I wrote a thing] Xmonad (part 2 of several) Back in 2016 Should write about Honu, if I haven't already. @ mdlbear | Entries tagged with writing : CRAP CRAP CRAP - the Starport sold in 2014, not 2013. That probably means I'm going to get hit with a massive tax bill. And I probably don't have receipts for most of the improvements. I'm screwed. -> unless, of course, I can make it come out to a loss. It may come close; we paid over 100K for the downstairs work, and nearly that for the initial work the year after we bought it. And it's capital gain, so the rate's lower. 15% But still. @ wicd_jan_18_newsletter.pdf * From the project list: added links on S.S.net/Doc/ to articles that were already there: Sex and the Single Link and Why and How To Keep Your Master Happy They were originally linked from DW but for some reason I never added the links. 0113Sa & awake 3:30ish?; don't know whether I managed to get back to sleep, because Ticia * up 5:30ish; W=202; * Dive from Pinyin to diacritics * Guitar: mostly Gentle Arms of Eden with a little Wheelin' and bits of other stuff. serious work on the chorus of Gentle Arms; the last line is still iffy. % current psych state also very iffy. @ elisp - Filling Markdown-style list items with hanging indentation in Emacs This solution just sets adaptive-fill-regexp -- this might replace gin-mode. cf. EmacsWiki: Fill Adapt @ hplgit/doconce: Lightweight markup language - document once, include anywhere " Compared to the related tools Sphinx and Markdown, DocOnce allows more types of equations (especially systems of equations with references), has more flexible inclusion of source code, integrates preprocessors, has special support for exercises, and produces cleaner LaTeX and HTML output. " @ mighty_make/Makefile at master · lf-araujo/mighty_make uses a define for usage information. Highly readable in the source. (break lines at slashes) define INFORMATION / Usage: / make prepare / .../ endef / export INFORMATION The recipe for help is just @echo "$$INFORMATION" x maker space meet-up at Freeland library -> 10am, so I missed it. ... and I would have had to preregister, which I didn't. Foo. * Walk: about half an hour - down to Skybird and back. Slowed down some on about half the way back; tired when I got home. Still, not too bad. -> project idea: indexer for songs, blog entries, etc. cf: (cd ~/.ljarchive/; gf Subject:) | wc -l # 6270 lines. (cd ~/.ljarchive/; gf Tags:.\*river) | wc -l # 535 River posts @ How To Build a Greenhouse or Hoop House fixed-radius benders for EMT conduit. (via HOOP HOUSE - Profitable Plants Digest) (via email from YD) one can also use PVC : Note: there is a stack of 12'? pressure-treated lumber behind the smaller shed. Could support a floor in the shed. Would still have to buy plywood. % Death and taxes. In addition to the stress of the tax fiasco, it's close to the anniversary of my mother-in-law (Jan 20) and father (Feb 5). So, ..., yeah. That. Even when I don't have a direct reminder (as I had just now from C), there's always something off about this time of year. % I don't know what the heck I'm feeling. Tense abdominal muscles. Diaphragm? Anxiety? @ Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells % I've been dropping stuff all day, mostly in the kitchen. Not paying attention. Menu 0107Su - 0113Sa * Sunday: leftovers * Monday: sweet+tangy brisket (crock pot) 8 hours - start by 10. -> 8-10 hours so should actually have been started at 8, but came out pretty well. * Tuesday: quiche (mushrooms and onions). Hard boil some eggs * Wednesday: pasta - bolognaise -or cheese- (from Thursday) (Vivian and Colleen) * Thursday: curried chicken (tika or something like) -> Penzey's Maharaja curry powder; sweetened condensed coconut milk - too sweet? not for Colleen, but g didn't like it. marginal for me * Friday: leftovers * Saturday: Leftovers/scrounge
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