Done Since 2018-02-18
I don't think I did much this week besides reading, but that was fun: mostly The Odyssey, in the new translation by Emily Wilson. Unless you've been reading
ysabetwordsmith's poetry elsejournal, you might be surprised to find a 12,000+ line epic poem in blank verse that reads like a Tom Clancy novel. Highly recommended; review to follow sometime this week. (I spent most of Friday and yesterday gathering quotes from other translations for comparison.)
We also had snow, both Sunday and Wednesday. Fortunately I had sense enough to take the van to my singing lesson Wednesday, so I was able to park it on the street. (Molly was already there; I'd spent a couple of hours in the morning over at the WiFire Coffeehouse charging it up.)
It was a good singing lesson -- neither N nor g was up for going, so I had the whole two hours to myself. I actually seem to be getting it.
And I actually wrote some software! Mostly Honu/flktex-mode.el, which is the start of an emacs major mode for editing song lyrics. The part I wrote last week is the command that converts a line of chords above a line of lyrics, which is the format you can usually find online, into a line of lyrics with the chords inlined in brackets. Fun! I hadn't written much Lisp recently, so it was good to dust off my functional programming skills.
So, not a bad week, all-in-all. No more than the usual amount of anxiety and depression.
Notes & links:
0218Su & awake ~2:30-3:30; noticed that it had started snowing * up 7am; W=203.2; : still snowing at 7:45 @ Cats are an extreme outlier among domestic animals | Ars Technica (ysabetwordsmith) Science Confirms That Cats Domesticated Themselves (Kinda) - Geek.com The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world | Nature Ecology & Evolution (abstract) Wikipedia dive from Cat Bastet - Wikipedia @ posted mdlbear | Done Since 2018-02-11 @ Announcing the winners of the Media Lab Disobedience Award - MIT Media Lab via Marc Edwards Wins AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award | AAAS * 15min: went out and checked on the greenhouse tent (still standing; no damage) and look around in the garage. Brought back a desktop music stand for the next gig. % note: used a cane, because snow and uncertain footing. * shelved some books. Uncovered the box of Analytical Chemistry (to be podded) and my old journals. Will probably keep those indoors; may be worthwhile scanning. @ Do People Who Own Cats Really Live Longer? - Pets Q() * to the grocery store with G after making the week's menu. * SL: hot dogs, mac+cheese mix, rye bread, swiss cheese, sauerkraut G picked up the bottle of sparkling shiraz that he'd spotted Friday, so we changed the menu to put beef on for tonight. * spent most of the afternoon reading The Odyssey. a real page-turner. I'd forgotten a lot of it. 0219Mo * up 5:50; W=203.2; @ F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository ([LWN.net]) @ Free as in Freedom: Table of Contents @ Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS @ A cyborg's journey [LWN.net] the quest for source code for medical devices. @ Jupyter: notebooks for education and collaboration [LWN.net] Jupyter - interactive notebooks * take a 6' shelf up to the house to go on the bottom of the South bookshelves. @ How The Last Jedi Outfoxes the Alt-Right | The Public Medievalist (siderea) spoilers for The Last Jedi and The Book of John Mandeville " Star Wars: The Last Jedi transforms a toxic medieval story into a celebration of diversity. The medieval tale is a celebration of (and anxiety about) the power of the conquering empire to imprison and eliminate those who refuse to be assimilated. It is a meditation on those who refuse to submit to a society based on whiteness, uniformity, conformity, masculinity, and barely sublimated daddy issues. The Last Jedi tells the same story, with all these same themes, but turns it into a spark of hope for a better, more-inclusive world. The film provides a model for how to engage with the compelling stories of the medieval past without repeating the errors of their authors. That’s a fox worth following. " % 11:30 headache - near and above left eye. Sinus? * 3 people coming to move boxes etc. into pod. -> got it done in under two hours. We'll call them back for the shed, once the snow melts. * wrote inline-chords-at-point in emacs lisp. Used it in disappearing-man.flk Definitely a bit of a struggle, but the end result is pretty good. 0219Tu * up 6ish; W=202.2; * installed new monitor - Sceptre E225W-19203R 22" A little bigger than the dying Samsung; I thought that was 1920x1080; apparently not. @ What is Ecosia? - The search engine that plants trees (ysabetwordsmith) "add to chrome" requires a rather creepy set of permissions -- it appears to be an extension rather than just a search engine. No thanks. # I'm considering going back to keeping done items in to.do; that would allow git to do delta compression. Minor, though, and arguably less convenient. & more debugging in flktex-utils: use lists instead of strings. It does cause some complication because you don't want to cons nil or an empty string onto a list, but it's worth it. It would be simpler in Haskell. * (housekeeper)T parked at the bottom of our driveway and got stuck; she had to call for help from someone with a large truck and a winch. * Tuesday: (kids back; family dinner night) mac+cheese, salad N, g, and j talked about their ongoing role-playing game. Fun! * more of The Odyssey. On book 20 now--the suitors are sitting down to their last meal. The thing reads like a thriller. -> Couldn't put it down; took it into the bedroom with me and finished at about 11. 0220We * Up 5:35; W=202.2; ~ let N sleep in -- j will be working on his project. x 3:15 C UNW. -> cancelled due to snow. * Some work on weather in bottom-bars and bottom-mobars * Go to town in the morning. Get N's Lyrica. Charge car. Marmalade, Tillamook cheese sticks, x spanakopita, thumbprint cookies, pasta, stick butter, broccoli, beef, (2) friskies, chutney, cran-grape LYRICA, check on subutex, cranberry; x Chains; CHARGE CAR. -> subutex ready tomorrow; no spanakopita, as usual. * Sitting in WiFire Coffeehouse for about 2 hours charging the car. Too slow; I'm still concerned, since N has about an 80-mile trip ahead of her tomorrow. * V and C spent most of the afternoon unboxing and sorting books. : ... and it's snowing. Only a little, but still. Worrying. * Singing lesson. All by myself this time. Drove Rosie because I wanted to get her up on the street before the driveway became impassible again. Good call. -> used the whole two hours -- sang When I Go, Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, The Bears, Ferret Went A'Courtin'. I'm actually getting the hang of things in the warmups. -> There was about an inch and a half of snow on the ground by the time I headed home around 7:15. Traffic on 525 was going about 25mph. I took E. Harbor and so on under 20. Not the worst I've driven in, but that was a while ago. * Wednesday:(music lesson) sandwiches * 15min: some book sorting. Science and math to the bedroom corner. % very sleepy around 10; went to bed and was asleep before C came in. 0222Th * up 5am; ; : Discovered that Ticia had been shut out of the room when C came in. * both kids have medical appointments in Seattle. N will take Molly. Leave at 7 * B1S1 sorting books. SF R-Z appear to be sorted now. There are a couple of strays. ~ set up subscription on Petco for digestive food. -> Petco is out of stock. :P Will notify. * UC address correction form sent to Northern Trust (Ricoh Retirement Plan) * UC set up auto-pay for Skagit Farmers Supply for propane * B1S2 put up a few of the small sculptures * set up autoship for Cricket's digestive food at Chewy.com. Much more user-friendly than Petco. They carry Öaut;kocat litter, but it's the same price as Amazon. It's made by Healthy Pet. Chewy doesn't seem to have the cracked pine, just the natural pine. OTOH it's marked as unavailable at Amazon, Walmart carries cracked pine, but it's not in stock there either. & change top sheet; I'll have to do a second load of laundry tonight. % 3:30 N and the kids got home with only 12mi's worth left in the battery; eep * B2 UC went through some mail. % sleepy and in pain (QL; mostly the right one). -> heating pad. * Thursday: (kids have doctors' appointments in Seattle) broccoli beef -> timed perfectly, and the sauce was thick enough for once. @ The Case Against Google - The New York Times " antitrust has always been about progress. Antitrust prosecutions are part of how technology grows. Antitrust laws ultimately aren’t about justice, as if success were something to be condemned; instead, they are a tool that society uses to help start-ups build on a monopolist’s breakthroughs without, in the process, being crushed by the monopolist. " @ The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English - The New York Times @ First Book. Chapman, George, trans. 1857. The Odysseys of Homer Full text of "The Odysseys of Homer: Translated According to the Greek" (1616) On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats | Poetry Foundation On First Looking into Chapman's Homer - Wikipedia " The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay; That wandered wondrous far, when he the town Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down; The cities of a world of nations, With all their manners, minds, and fashions, He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes, ... " [quotations redacted -- look for them in the upcoming review.] The Odyssey of Homer : Homer : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive Palmer's translation; 1891. Poor scan, not proof-read: I've cleaned it up a bit. " Speak to me, Muse, of the adventurous man who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many the men whose towns he saw, whose ways he proved; and many a pang he bore In his own breast at sea while struggling for his life and his men's ... " : Lattimore's translation, which I enjoyed about 50 years ago in college " Tell me, Muse, of the man of may ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, ..." (transcribed by hand from Amazon's preview.) : Now let's look at Wilson's translation: " Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, ... " @ The Stoneman Douglas High school drama club perform "Shine," a song they wrote in the wake of the shooting at their Parkland, Florida, school. YouTube f(G) 0223Fr g's 14th birthday * up 6ish; W=203.4; @ The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Alexander Pope) - Free Ebook (1725) " The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd, Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound; Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall, Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd, Their manners noted, and their states survey'd, On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore, ..." @ Heroic couplet - Wikipedia rhymed iambic pentameter @ Books by Homer - Project Gutenberg probably has most available translations @ ‘The Odyssey’ and the Other - The Atlantic @ Women Who Weave - Reading Emily Wilson’s Translation of the Odyssey With Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad - EIDOLON * B1S1 guitar: Lock-Keeper, focusing on Bm and Bm/A (Bm7? From the melody it actually sounds more like Bm\sus2. Replace with Am or A for playability?) @ Backing Up Your Database « WordPress Codex 7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared (Pros and Cons) * I'm teaching today, and also doing the swimming lesson run. 0224Sa * Up 6:15ish; W=203.4; * Guitar 25min Lock-Keeper, Crossroads Devil, No Other Name, QV. QV probably doesn't want to be capoed up much if at all because of the high C. @ Who I Want to Hire (N, on the grounds that it's a close match and shows that I'm better than I see myself as being.) It's also from 2013 in Berlin, so... " There are people out there who are desperate for someone like you. You really are that good. " (N) % I still have a hard time convincing myself. The Passionate Programmer (2nd edition): Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler | The Pragmatic Bookshelf Uses This / Chad Fowler * pass N a list of what I'm good at/looking for in a job & bucket-list brainstorming with N (her suggestion, of course). The new items: do something/write something that makes a difference to people could be a song, or a book, or a piece of software; or volunteer work, perhaps. take care of my family = menu: * Sunday: london broil, broccoli, sauteed mushrooms, sparkling shiraz * Monday: chicken tikka masala * Tuesday: (kids back; family dinner night) mac+cheese, salad * Wednesday:(music lesson) sandwiches * Thursday: (kids have doctors' appointments in Seattle) broccoli beef
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