... I wouldn't have that many quarters, but there'd still be way more quarters than they ought to be.
Fortunately the installer agreed that, um, no, it shouldn't look like that.
One more thing to fix ...
-the Centaur
Posts published in “Real Life”
It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.
Sometimes we call it living.
... still a little behind. Pictured: the "back entrance" to Morgan Hill's very nice downtown; this little pathway from one of the parking garages always reminds me of coming down a gangplank onto a pier leading to a little sea town, even though in reality the sea is nowhere to be found.
-the Centaur
One reason blogging suffers for me is that I always prioritize doing over blogging. That sounds cool and all, but it's actually just another excuse. There's always something more important than doing your laundry ... until you run out of underwear. Blogging has no such hard failure mode, so it's even easier to fall out of the habit. But the reality is, just like laundry, if you set aside a little time for it, you can stay ahead - and you'll feel much healthier and more comfortable if you do.
-the Centaur
Pictured: "Now That's A Steak Burger", a 1-pound monster from Willard Hicks, where I took a break from my million other tasks to catch up on Plans and the Structure of Behavior, the book that introduced idea of the test-operate-test-exit (TOTE) loop as a means for organizing behavior, a device I'm finding useful as I delve into the new field of large language model planning.
Yeah. The microblogging will continue until the posting rate reaches 1/day.
I feel that one problem I have with "daily blogging" is that quick posts are no problem. But if I have a longer idea - but can't finish it in time - I then forget to do a shorter post to make up for it.
And missing a post itself is a problem. What I find when trying to build a regular practice (daily blogging, taking karate twice a week, whatever) is that if you skip one time, even for a "really good reason", then mysteriously the next two or three times you'll HAVE to skip for "unavoidable" reasons.
In this, case in point, I started writing a longer article on debugging software. There was more to it than I expected - I had wanted to make an off-the-cuff comment, and found my thoughts rapidly expanding - and then the next day I was flying, and the next day catching up on work, and the next day owed my part of the annual report to the church board, and so on. And then its DAYS later and boom no posts. I think at this point I am 8 behind in numbered posts, though there were a few un-numbered ones which I would count, except, if I don't, it makes the problem harder, which helps build the discipline I'm trying to build.
SO! Let's get back on that horse then. Update metadata, hit publish.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my evening work ritual, 2-3 times a week when I'm not having dinner with my wife, is to go to some place to eat (preferably one with a bar or high top tables, so I can stretch out my bum knee), crack open a book, and read a chunk of a chapter while having a nice meal. Most of my books get read this way.
... from the last numbered post, or plus six from the last post.
As for the image? Yeah. They've got a lot of problems on that boat.
-the Centaur
... the block editor of Wordpress seems to be making my old non-block-editor posts turn into solid walls of text. See the post "Pascal's Wager and Purchasing Parsley":
Yeah, it's not supposed to be looking like that. Gotta track those down and fix them.
In other news, my Half-Cheetah policy is successfully training to "expected" levels of performance. Yay! I guess that means my code for the assignment is ... sorta correct? Time to clean it up and submit it.
-the Centaur
... and the trick to getting it working was, as usual, "working just a little bit harder than you want to". Shortly after my last post, I got REINFORCE, a classic reinforcement learning algorithm, successfully training on my local machine, with apparent learning for all three environments in the assignment (though whether my solution is able to reach the expected final level of performance or not is still an open question).
-the Centaur
... delays will continue until progress is made. :-P
-the Centaur
The Charlotte airport, as I recall. Enjoy. One day behind, but it's 3am and I gotta call it.
-the Centaur
A brainflash by my wife, turned into an out-of-nowhere concoction. Breakfast-burrito sized spring rolls, filled with almost entirely raw veggies, backed up by an amazing mix-and-match sauce, all entirely vegan.
We're going to have to add this to The Rotation.
-the Centaur
Eight pieces of sushi from P. F. Chang's. Sadly, even their "vegetarian" options have added fish flakes, making them not vegetarian, much less vegan - so me and my vegan wife no longer eat together there. Sad, because it was one of our favorite date night places until they updated their menu and she re-asked about whether her favorite dish was still vegan - only to find out that it had never been. :-(
-the Centaur
SO part of the reason we moved from California (other than the fires and the burning and the lack of water falling from the sky and all that stuff) to South Carolina was to reduce friction. Since here we can afford a house that has, like, floor area, my wife gets a big art studio on one end (spoiler: it's not enough - she's taken over the garage and living room too) ...
... and I get a big library at the other. In that library, I've been trying to remove creative barriers to all my different projects, which started me on the Drawing Every Day series earlier, and has been very helpful for research on my fiction and my science. One of those friction-reducing tools is a floating bookcase:
I got one of these from the Container Store to organize a set of books I had collected at work related to robot navigation (pictured up top), and since the piece of software that controls a navigating robot is called a "navigation stack", and it was a stack of books about navigation, hence, it is my, um, "navigation stack". (Hey, I never said it was a particularly clever nickname).
These have proved super useful to pull all the books on a given topic into a prominent place so it is easier to see, think about, and find them. I've been doing that to all the topics in my library just by organizing, but it is really useful to have some things much more clearly visible to kickstart that process.
During the pandemic, I ordered another one, but they shipped it without its heavy, sturdy metal base. Rather than give me a replacement base, they sent me an entire new floating bookcase - which was great, mind you, but that left me with the bunch of weird shelves above and the bookcase's long spine.
We're all about recycling here at the Boobie Hatch, so I started thinking about how to salvage these pieces and make a whole nother shelf. Unfortunately, the hard metal base is a carefully machined component. How to make a sturdy shelf when I don't have the ability to make what's arguably the most important piece?
Enter power tool girl.
Sandi and I have a great working relationship: I know how to design sturdy, offbeat pieces of office furniture, and Sandi has the woodworking tools to turn more of those designs into reality than I am able to do myself. After discussing it, measuring the quirky space it would have to go into, and designing the overall concept together, she cut the above wood to shape and painted it for me to match the other furniture.
Here I come back in. Often these pieces have something weird about how to put them together, and I take over the last mile of construction, using my careful, patented "measure several times, cut once, curse when it doesn't fit, then re-measure and re-cut again while grumbling under my breath" technique.
Getting this to work was tricky, because we had to ensure two kinds of stability. The spine of the shelf is a rectangular metal tube, designed to firmly bolt into a heavy metal plate to make sure the shelf stays upright; the edges of this tube would cut straight into an ordinary piece of wood, causing the shelf to sway over time. On top, we used two carefully aligned strips of metal to prevent the spine from cutting into that wood ...
... and on the bottom, we have two not quite so prettily aligned strips of steel, set at off angles so the screws do not collide with the ones coming from above (and are not co-linear, potentially causing splits in the wood). If I remember my geometry, these will prevent the bolts from pulling all the way through the wood. The result is a shelf that stands upright and is reasonably stable:
You may have been wondering what that weird notch is in the bookcase, and why the feet are so big.
The answer is this weird corner of the library, where a room divider and power cable can't be moved ...
... but a shelf can be designed and cut to fit. A small block of wood hides underneath there, to provide extra stability under the shelf; also we added felt so the floor would not get scuffed (though the wood the previous owners chose already looks pre-scuffed; go figure).
Now the shelves can be added back in ...
... and then, the books!
The navigation stack is reloaded!
Now I have three much more topical collections of books, far better organized and discoverable. (The three collections are Thomistic philosophy, consciousness, and the navigation stack; these are sandwiching bookshelves on AI, deep learning, free will and executive control, and sleep and dreaming, among others; all these topics are far more related than at first they appear, but more on that later).
One more project down.
1001 to go!
-the Centaur
7am fare at the Charlotte airport. Can't quite remember the name of the place, but one of the adventures of red-eye travel is finding a breakfast joint open at 7am (or earlier) on the Atlanta or Charlotte layover prior to the last leg back to South Carolina. There are a few good options in Atlanta - strangely enough, not the fast food ones, which often open a bit later, but as I recall Gordon Biersch is open at 6am, and there's usually some fun quirkly place which you can find to help take the edge off after the long overnight flight.
-the Centaur
I'm updating the site, which unfortunately means my beloved book banners need to change. The combo of banner, slider of featured posts, and sticky intro post meant the blog content was way, WAY below the fold, which I do not like (and is not recommended). I had plans to revamp the theme, but didn't find one that easily let me do what I want, and the best was becoming the enemy of the good.
So I fixed the glitch instead. I un-stuck the intro post and moved it into both the about sidebar and into the slider, and eliminated the banner, which now puts the recent content above the fold.
Hopefully this works for you. More updates will roll out as I think of them.
-the Centaur
Brands of cat food, that is. As I recall, the farther it is to the right, the more likely it is that Loki will eat it. The farther it is to the left, the more likely it is that Loki would rather go outside than even smell it.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you working here?
-the Centaur
I'm sorry, but that is NOT alcohol.
THIS is alcohol.
There, I fixed it for U. You're welcome.
-the Centaur
Pictured: (1): Wine leftover from the Edgemas party; it was not impressive. (B, or 2): Neil Peart's favorite drink, Macallan, bought special for the party; it was quite impressive. (iii, or C, or 3): the La Parilla Margarita, medium, on the rocks, extra salt on the rim; about the best drink you can get - locally in the Upstate, that is, not counting driving to Reposado in Palo Alto to get their Cadillac Margarita, again, extra salt on the rim.
... makes six pieces. Mathiness says that the maximum number of pieces you can end up with from this is sixteen, which is apparently one plus the 5th triangle number, but on reflection I don't think sixteen pieces would make a good quesadilla. I think you're better off ordering the nachos instead.
-the Centaur
Better late than never. I really should develop a Photoshop filter or macro (is there such a thing) for this lines-and-shading effect, but it does actually require some tweaking to get right.
-the Centaur
Four friends, thirty-five (plus) years after high school.
-the Centaur
Wow! 2023. What the hell? Seems like Blade Runner was just yesterday. But it was actually pre-pandemic! But in the real world, it's a "new year", as most Americans mark it, so it's time for New Year's Resolutions.
Or is it? As far as I recall, the science of New Year's Resolutions - whether it works or not to set new goals at the start of the new year - is decidedly mixed, and a brief check seems to confirm that.
But New Year's Aspirations, yes, I have those. For one, I'd like to start blogging every day. For another, it would be great to resume drawing every day. And Wednesday, my wife and I are going to buy bicycles.
For this year, though, I plan to edit my fourth Dakota Frost novel, SPECTRAL IRON, in the hope it breaks the logjam of the eight (8!) unedited novel drafts sitting on my hard drive, and to make progress on several other creative projects, at work and in life. To get started on that ... I'm now going to get back to work.
Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: an aspiration made real: the hand-me-down "comfy chair" from Francis Produce, which I have kept for 25+ years, now turned into a reading nook in my new library. That nook is filled with artwork and standees and books and novels and comic books, and in that comfy space there I have actually, like, started to read books again and stuff after years of and years of stunted fiction reading, post-grad-school.