It all started when I found a cat January 18. In the days were waiting for the shelter to open, we looked at the Oakland Animal Services website perhaps too much. So many dogs need homes; indeed, it’s where we found Ruffie in 2023. Alan thus applied to foster a dog.
Winter resting while I study on the dog couch.
In the middle of some turmoil involving our own two cats, we had some added excitement in January thanks to my randomly deciding to take Ruffie for a short walk to meet Alan at the bus stop at 20:45 Saturday night. On the way down there, I found a small carrier with what seemed to be an animal inside.
A male cat I found in a carrier abandoned on a sidewalk near the bus stop.
Yesterday I did a fairly long run in downtown and west Oakland past some slightly taller buildings than in my first set of GPS comparison tests last month. I’m glad I had the Garmin 67i for this one, not only because its track logs were the cleanest overall, but because both my Fitbit Charge 6 and Pixel 6 Pro Runkeeper app had problems preventing me from having a complete tracklog. At least this put me over 55 percent completion for Oakland for my running every street project!
Sample A
I recently picked up a Garmin GPSMAP 67i off eBay to compare the GPS accuracy to that of my phone and my Fitbit Charge 6. Long story short, the results have been so wonderful I will henceforth carry an extra device heavier than my phone on every run and hike.
Sample A
Sunday was our last opportunity for a hike while Vera was staying with us for a couple of weeks. Alan suggested Berkeley, so I made a plan to hike up to Wildcat Peak and also to check out an old missile launch site in the Berkeley Hills. Because we hiked near there with Remi before, I didn’t think to confirm whether dogs were allowed. Needless to say, we found “No dogs” signs upon entering Tilden Nature Preserve, which is the subset of Tilden Regional Park we hoped to hike through. We thus diverted back to the Meadows Canyon Trail we hiked a year or two before with Ricky, and had a fine time. I attempted to take some photos of plants while we were there. I need to practice more.
View of the San Francisco Bay from Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley.
Our lovely Remi who recently passed away had a rolled leather collar and leather leash. Despite them being “cheap,” they were still in great condition after 10 years. So about four months ago, I decided to get a similar set for Ruffie. I found many on Amazon that would have set me back about a third of what I ended up paying. I decided to get something “high quality” and picked a shop on Etsy with all 5 star reviews. I have now learned why Etsy reviews are so high, and it’s not because of product quality. It’s because Etsy doesn’t allow reviews after a reasonable amount of time has passed.
Update: Thankfully in this case I was able to make contact with the merchant and get the issue resolved, so I am happy for that. It doesn’t change any of the points here, and I urge Etsy to allow for writing reviews longer after the item was received to instill confidence the items are durable enough to consider purchasing.
Fraying products from CleverWithLeatherKY
We basically stopped our training sessions over the past two months. We were already less regimented after the Wisconsin road trip in July, and then August quickly became all about poor Remi. After he passed away, I couldn’t bring myself to resume training Ruffie right away. He’s well …
I wish I could erase the past two weeks. Alan’s beautiful Remi was healthy and active, especially for a dog of 12 years. He came into my life four years ago. We were together nearly every hour since, through the pandemic and several moves. Those years were challenging for me personally, and he helped me cope when I was struggling, which was often. I loved going on adventures with him. I loved taking care of him. I love him.
But the day after our last 6 mile hike, I gave him Frontline Plus per the directions. Two days later, Remi stopped voluntarily eating, and his muscles stiffened to the point he could barely walk. The next week was desperate attempts to diagnose, to feed, to comfort. The final hours, of trying to raise his body temperature and then rush to the hospital as my beloved Alan administered rescue breathing and CPR in the back of the Jeep, are hours I hope to never endure again. They are hours I nonetheless cannot stop reliving in my mind.
As I reflect on Remi’s life and my culpability in its end, I am only comforted that he was always a happy dog, and as far as I could tell was not in any pain through his last moments, when I am sure he heard Alan and me both telling him we love him.
Our sweet Remi, on a hike in May 2023.
We did a road trip to Wisconsin for about 2 weeks of the past 3. That provided some great new experiences for Ruffie, but it also broke some of my training consistency. I’ve been shifting focus as I’ve been doing more research on dog behavior as well.
Running …
Time has been flying lately.
Running
I haven’t been running much, but I did do a few runs with Ruffie so far. The longest was 6 miles on the trails 2 weeks ago, and the most recent 4.5 on the roads here just today.
Training
We’re progressing …
Our new dog Ruffie has been adapting pretty well to life at our house. He’s still getting used to the cats and we’re barely started with training, but overall it’s much less stressful now than it was the first couple of days. Thanks to a prong collar …
Two Saturdays ago, May 27, Alan and I welcomed Ruffie the husky into our home. He is a 2.5 year old pup who had been at the Oakland Animal Services shelter since early February. While his first days here were a little chaotic even under constant supervision, he is generally pretty well behaved and is even starting to get along with one of our cats, Kiko.
Ruffie enjoying his first moments in our yard
As has my life, my Runkeeper and Fitbit tracking has been a mess for more than a year. Most of my runs have two or even three copies in Runkeeper. My stats have therefore been useless, not that I’ve had time to look at them anyway.
I had been meaning to sit down and document some issues with the Runkeeper-Fitbit integration before I started tracking many GPS activities in Fitbit. I expected I would track each runs with my Fitbit Ionic and the Runkeeper app on the phone, and then delete one, leaving whichever was best. This hedged against GPS breakdowns, which have happened on any device I’ve ever tested. The first problem was Fitbit did not allow saving notes with the activity, so I would have to copy the notes from the Runkeeper tracked run to the Fitbit imported run on Runkeeper. Upon saving, often the miles would change, perhaps due to some algorithm Runkeeper has to smooth GPS jitter. Whether or not the miles changed, it seemed Runkeeper would then reimport the Fitbit activity since apparently the one resaved with the note was no longer connected to the original.
I’ve been using Dvorak full time on computer for 17 months, a number that shocked me just now when I initially wrote “5 months” and then realized I was off by a year. I have not deliberately practiced much in the last year, and am also not as fast as I hoped I would be by this point. Still, I have no regrets. I have also not had any typing related hand or finger pain, which was what led me to this originally.
I still use QWERTY on my phone, but I have been thinking about switching there, too. My brain does seem to treat them totally separately; I initially suck at typing QWERTY every time I try on computer but never think twice on the phone.
Since I want to do some more practice, I’ll continue to log some statistics to this entry just as I have in the past in Switching to Dvorak and Switching to Dvorak, Part 2.
I have noted before how Spotlight sucks. Well, it still sucks.
I can rarely launch the intended app, as it either never gets selected or it changes before I hit enter.
After accidentally deleting my Runkeeper activity today, I was able to mostly restore it thanks to Google’s somewhat creepy location history. Perhaps some day Runkeeper will be more user friendly.
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Every once in a while, I write a blog post where I want to put a few footnotes. More frequently, I reference sources. My writing is far from academic, but I figure the least I can contribute is pointing readers (usually just my future self) in the right direction. When I consider the best ways to accomplish these goals, I am reminded of all the other rigor and consistency related issues I have yet to adequately address. The Buddha was right: life is suffering.
I am so far enjoying “The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007). In searching briefly for a summary both to inform the rest of my read and to send to Yizhen, I found a review and critique by David Aldous from January 2009. I have no strong opinion on Aldous’s main disagreement about the cumulative impact of non black swan events, but I appreciated more perspective. I should check out the other critiques mentioned and Taleb’s “shorter and more cohesive account”, “The fourth quadrant: a map of the limits of statistics“.
I am nonreligious, yet religion fascinates me. In particular, evolving knowledge of Jesus has separated his life and teachings from my notion of the Church.
As a young Wisconsinite, I learned the Church, God and Jesus are a conglomeration, like AOL-Time Warner. Or was it the Holy Spirit and Yahweh and the Lord Pope? The details eluded me, but there were definitely three entities, all the same. Or maybe I am thinking of the trifecta of less important Eastern competitors, Buddhism and Islam and Judaism. Religion was nebulous. All I knew for sure was in America we are united, under one monopoly of God.
Day of Silence at Hartford Union High School in April 2006
Growing up I was not much of a reader, but apparently that has changed. I started using Goodreads earlier this year to track my reading, mostly to encourage me to write some notes upon finishing, and partly to remember what I even read. It has been helping! After some investigation …
After a few months mostly typing in QWERTY due to a compromise to get some programming done faster, I am recommitted to forcing myself to use Dvorak. I picked it back up quickly. In fact, right off the bat I was possibly faster than when I left off. Strange. This entry will continue documenting my progress.
I almost pried myself from reading news story after story this morning thanks to Google Now’s suggestions and the endless shenanigans of the current administration. Then I clicked one more, a SitePoint article “The Best Markdown Editors for Mac“. I skimmed it, mostly looking to see if MacDown was mentioned. It was not, but another caught my eye, and I was converted to Typora before I even tried it. The editor itself is the live preview!
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Over the past few months of using Anki consistently, I have been trying to streamline my process of adding and organizing cards, as well as making them somewhat pretty. It has not been easy!
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Pictures coming later, but I wanted to write this now before I let it slide for a year like last year!
I expected this marathon to be bad, and it was, but I did finish. I really hope I manage to do a proper training schedule for my next marathon …
I spent some time today reading Vim documentation and a handful of blog posts. I learned the extreme basics of Vim many years ago, but I have not graduated much past cut-paste and search-replace until this year. In my mission to memorize more things I never bothered to for lack …
My long running goal of properly training for a marathon will again not be realized this year, but I still feel good. And kind of crappy. If only the San Francisco Marathon were in a few more weeks instead of a few days!
At 950 miles of running plus all the walking I’ve done in the past two years, my Venada Rojas from Luna Sandals are showing some strap wear. That is objectively pretty good, though I know they could last a lot longer. I need to figure out how to avoid wearing the strap. Perhaps a wider back, or tighter?
I was listening to Reality by Oliver Koletzki with my headphones when I thought I accidentally switched the audio to my large speakers. Alan was in the room and indicated he heard nothing, so I was momentarily very confused! Then I rewound the track and found the same thing happen again, at which point I realized the track was either post processed or the microphone physically moved so the sound would seem to have moved behind. I couldn’t find any web pages mentioning this track, hence this blog, probably only for my future reference!
Following my issues using the official Google Drive client, I tried another Google Drive client called Insync. I wanted to write more, but time is flying and I wanted to post some screenshots before I forgot. Bottom line: I managed to get about 700GB of my documents uploaded to Google Drive using Insync, though I needed to employ a folder by folder approach else it would freeze. I am using some of Insync’s filtering features to keep my projected synchronized on my laptop and desktop, but the app itself is somewhat clunky and the UI blocks the folder name once I enter it in the filtering section. Here are some screenshots I intended to document earlier.
Amazon pioneered consumer confidence with their product ratings system, but my confidence in that system is greatly diminished. As if the SEO driven keyword soup product titles were not bad enough, many vendors now differentiate their products with false descriptions and claims backed by fake five star reviews. The products are often cheap enough customers likely don’t bother with returns or complaints, but at the same time I am surprised the fake reviews are submitted by accounts that did not first buy the product. It would only cost vendors the small Amazon fee to ask their employees to actually buy the products and give them back to the seller. Clearly vendors see no point in even that small expense since Amazon’s system enables fake, unverified reviews to drive search and sales. As it stands, you can only filter by verified purchase status and eliminate many of the fakes once you are on the product page. It’s a shame Amazon includes the fake reviews in the ratings by default and forbids filtering out the fake reviews from the product search.
I’m a bit frustrated right now trying to work through a small cascade of issues so I can file some claims for some corals that arrived yesterday. This is a quick entry to document where I am in the process.
Since Amazon canceled the unlimited storage I planned to use to replace BackBlaze, I have been weighing my options. I decided to pay $100 to upgrade my Google Drive to 1TB for one year and try syncing my documents (~900GB) there, but after three days I have not managed to upload much due to the Mac client crashing frequently. Not promising!
Other books by John McWhorter and Steven Pinker had already stripped away most of my linguistic sense of right and wrong, but “Words on the Move” finished the job. It convinced me the new words and new uses for old words we hear, even if disagreeable to some, are exactly …
Less than a month ago I posted Switching from Backblaze to Arq+Amazon and already Amazon has canceled its unlimited plan, thus foiling my backup plan.
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Years ago, I started using Mint to aggragate my financial information. The idea made sense, like browser based Gmail made sense compared to using Outlook on the desktop. Mint seemed to be the first free service to connect with most financial institutions. Now there are many such services, and Mint has not managed to resolve any of the usability issues I have experienced all those years. I was about to look for alternatives today till I found a workaround for my latest annoyance: lack of bulk import.
I right clicked the updateTransaction.xevent request and selected *Copy as cURL*.
I spent a bit of today taking photos of creatures in my saltwater tank, and while I had my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens out, I figured I would take a photo of Alan’s eye and then my eye. One thing led to another, and I tried to figure out how to tether my Nikon D800 to my laptop so I could use the screen as a viewfinder, making self eye portraits easier. It was not easy.
I have been behind in blogging about the tank, but here are some more photos.
These duncans were an interesting piece from Aquarium Depot. At first I didn't even realize it was a duncan since it had a bunch of small heads and not a single large head like my first one. But after a few days, they opened up, and now the heads expand almost an inch beyond the base and look quite healthy.
It’s been a while since I updated about my saltwater aquarium since I have been focusing on wrapping up some personal projects as soon as possible. For now, here are a few photos and videos of strange creatures, including a pretty cool albeit not terribly high quality video of a spaghetti worm (Eupolymnia crasscornis) that climbed the glass and possibly tried to attack or at least irritated a nassarius snail, who then fought back and jumped to the ground onto a starfish.
I found this spaghetti worm climbing the glass one night after dark.
I noticed May 11 I could not upload photos to Facebook via the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Facebook plugin I had been using for several years. This was not a surprise, as I have been having intermittent issues with my publisher connections through my recent reformatting and data shuffling process. I thought the worst case would be needing to reauthorize the plugin and perhaps create a new “May 2017” album to continue uploading to. Then I checked Facebook and saw it was much worse. Thousands of photos were missing, and I was not alone.
These plans already have been foiled: Amazon Drive failure to launch
Having recently reformatted my desktop to document my setup in my dotfiles and hackintosh Git repositories, I needed to reinitiate my backup process. It became clear Backblaze was not going to work for me any longer due to the fragility of their architecture. After admittedly minimal research (I have pursued far too many tangents lately!), I am ditching Backblaze and trying Arq+Amazon Cloud Drive instead. Backblaze was at least kind enough to give a refund for my unused time.
Backblaze Inherit Backup State / Backblaze failed to make this computer inherit your backup state. / ERR_error_unknown
While posting the last entry about the sucky Withings experience, I wanted to upload a few screenshots I knew were on my system somewhere. I pasted the filename into Spotlight, and it popped right up.
spotlight.png
I just completed migrating my weight and heart rate information to a new Withings account because they are incapable of figuring out why my Wi-Fi Body Scale (WBS01) (new version) can no longer be associated to my original account. Their export and import process does not support temperature data, so I need to continue using my Thermo with the Thermo app signed into my original account, while using my blood pressure monitor with the Withings app is signed into my new account. Additionally, the import process ignores comments, so I needed to manually copy and paste all the comments for each measurement. What a pain!
I thought I had low confidence in Fitbit based on my experience over the years, but man, now I don’t know who I would recommend for smart body devices. I really want to support the pioneers instead of the big companies, but if they keep screwing up, I guess there’s no point.
I can only seem to sync my Fitbit Charge 2 on macOS Sierra with the Fitbit wireless dongle and with my system Bluetooth explicitly disabled.
An error occurred while syncing! / An unknown error occurred!
After initially thinking it was a crab due to some possibly erroneous information on a vendor’s website, I realized I found my first sea spider. He measures about a centimeter. Despite my revisionist inclination to nurture what others consider harmful pests, I quarantined him and will probably keep it that way.
I found a pycnogonid, or sea spider, in a batch of small corals and algae. It apparently survived the wash stage, unless it caught a ride inside a tube worm. I'm not sure what I will do with him, as he might prey on corals.
I had seen and run the defaults command many times on my Macs, usually in the course of following a tutorial to change some behavior Apple had removed the ability to easily modify. I never looked into the command much, but now that I did, I am glad I will be able to automate more of my setup!
This is the most painful entry I have ever written, but hopefully the pain will be worth it. I am typing in the Dvorak keyboard layout thanks to a deceptively enticing set of lessons at learn.dvorak.nl, which I found linked on Reddit while researching what people do with programmable layers like my CODE 61 key has.
dvorak-keyboard-training.png
Last week while mesmerized by my tank’s visible plankton, I spotted something that looked and moved like a jellyfish. It was probably half a millimeter, and quickly disappeared. Today I found another one, or possibly the same one, but larger. I captured it with a pipette and photographed it under a microscope. It measured about 1.0 mm.
Possible baby jellyfish under microscope
Reading Friedman’s book The World Is Flat more than a decade ago inspired my interest in the global community. I’ll have to read his newish book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations! He talks about it in this clip, and then comments on Trump…
[youtube OTMHFjkk674]
I received a crab Aquarium Depot markets as a “lavender sponge crab,” and the bag contained hundreds of what I initially thought were some sort of pods, but later identified as baby crabs in the initial stage, zoea. I’m not sure they survived my tank, but after a few days the crab is apparently again carrying tons of eggs.
Video of one of the hundreds of baby crabs under microscope with a 10x objective lens
I’m constantly baffled by strangeness in working with Files on Apple operating systems. Even after using OS X almost exclusively for years now, I still find file operations to be unintuitive or plain silly. This could be a laundry list of issues, but I’ll just mention a few …
When I message a new person using Messenger, I frequently want to copy and paste the phone number elsewhere once I have begun talking. This is maddeningly difficult and requires me to either copy and paste the number before I hit enter upon first entering it, write it with pen and paper or fully open the Contacts app and locate the contact and number.
Once a conversation is started, double clicking the number or the contact name produces a little popup with the contact info. You would think you could copy the info easily, especially since you can highlight portions of it. But the copy function does not work at all here.
Since I decided to start a saltwater tank a few days ago, I’ve been researching supplies and equipment constantly. There are so many options before even considering the vast species of corals, fish and other animals!
spectrum diagram from unitednuclear.com
Alan started keeping a saltwater aquarium earlier this year, and since I’ve been living with it for the past two months, I’ve become fascinated with reefkeeping. I am planning to start my own once I move to my next apartment in January. This leaves me plenty of time to obsessively research the many aspects of marine life.
Sea apple at 6th Ave Aquarium and Flowers
About six weeks ago I got a post office box. Soon after that I signed up for “street addressing“, a service provided by my post office involving an alternative address format that somewhat disguises that I have a PO box. I also now get delivery notifications for pieces of mail sent to my box.
This week I’ve have done much less studying for the GRE than I hoped given I am taking the test in four days. Tuesday I thought I would tune out the election coverage till later in the night when I hoped to see confirmed all the media’s predictions Hillary Clinton would be elected. But none of that went according to plan.
Within just two days, the petition to the Electoral College was signed more times than any petition in the site's history.
Since I am in between apartments, I got a post office box to avoid changing my address everywhere for a short period, and to avoid cluttering my friend’s mailbox with my crap. I was then able to set up forwarding from my old address to the PO box. I tried changing my address directly with all my credit card companies and banks, but only some of them allowed a PO box.
Today I reported for jury duty for my first time, but was not chosen to serve. Maybe I’ll have better luck next year, and at least it got me out of the house!
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Back in April, I ordered a large magnet to have some fun. I intended to make some sort of art project using pieces of metal suspended by thin strings, but before I got that far, the magnet ended up as a centerpiece on our dining table for most of the year.
Iron filings on mirror on neodymium magnet
While eating my tostada salad from The Little Chihuahua, I watched Celeste Headlee’s TED talk “10 ways to have a better conversation”. Following are the ten points and some notes and thoughts.
[youtube R1vskiVDwl4]
I try to launch an app by starting to type its name, and sometimes it initially shows up in the list, but then disappears. The name still prefills, but hitting return key has no effect. I must wait some seconds for the app list to populate again and let me launch the app.
I know now I cannot sleep. I probably knew before, but I tried getting lost in music, vaguely hoping my consciousness be released. Trying to get lost is something I am not well equipped to handle, at any rate. I know exactly where I am. The vibrations in my earphones, captivating as they seem, somehow serve only to bring my thoughts into sharper focus. I can no longer contain my mind; the thoughts burst out, and I must write, lest I lose all hope of honoring them, of honoring myself. I am being haunted by the breaking heart of the woman who used to own my house, and I think that is why I must depart.
I haven’t been very social this year, spending most of my time at home. While spending some time with a friend, I pondered posting a question to Facebook and seeing if anyone would respond. I wrote:
For those who want to get to know each other and have the time, please answer:
What do you try to do every day?
I have a new inflamed tastebud, but thankfully the one I got yesterday is mostly better now. I haven’t had any for a while (weeks? months?), but I do remember having three at once sometime this year. I had been getting them somewhat frequently, but they did definitely heal, so I was at least pretty sure it was due to something I did periodically, not every day. Is it spicy food? I’m not sure, but that’s what I tell myself.
I just realized (in July 2017) I forgot to finish posting this entry last year. That’s a bit of a shame, as it was my best time (3:58:09) and I was now hoping to remember a bit about how I prepared. The photos will have to suffice!
Obligatory mid marathon Golden Gate Bridge selfie.
I received a request from Coinbase to provide more personal information. While I still hope bitcoin replaces much of our current payments system, I must admit I am at least not being interrogated by my bank regarding the use of my account.
The past six weeks have flown by, and I don’t feel I have accomplished very much. I need to improve, stat!
Note: I started writing this entry at the end of Week 6, in early June. I then lost the text and several more weeks passed, so I wrote a (brief) new version, Scorecard: year 2, weeks 1–10. The below text wasn’t supposed to be final, but I’m just posting it as is.
I’ve done a horrible job promptly completing my weekly reviews in conjunction with my second “12 Week Year“, but I have not given up. This is going to be a cursory attempt at covering the last 10 weeks, not only because 10 weeks is a long time to remember all the details for, but also because I seem to have lost (Update: now found) what of this entry I had started writing a few weeks ago. Sometimes doing thing over results in better work, but I find that isn’t the case when I don’t want to be doing the work in the first place. Ideally I want to spend more time reviewing, but I’m a bit behind as it is.
Scores through Week 10 of Year 2
To improve the readability of the body text in my posts, I use Markdown as much as possible. When uploading and inserting images using Movable Type’s editor, the result is a jumble of image tags all on one line containing extra information I don’t need. I finally took 10 minutes to fix this, making it output Markdown instead.
A few weeks ago, Tyler told me to look out for some contact lenses that would be delivered here, for he desperately needed them for his last month living in Europe. I was glad to be able to help, but it didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.
The United Kingdom wanted a piece of this action and put a "Customs Fee to Pay" sticker on the package.
A month ago I wrote a sort of history of my years of friendship with someone suffering with manic bipolar disorder. I concluded “Mania de Mayo” with a comment on my tiredness and a hopefully sarcastic comment about the type of friend I am. Not much good has happened since then regarding my friend, it seems to me, and his new friends along with some old are now organizing for a possible impending psychotic episode.
I never cared to have display ads on my website, as it doesn’t cost very much in server power and mostly serves as my own personal archive. Also, I only get a few thousand page views a month. That’s more than I would guess an inconsistent blog with no target audience would get, but certainly not enough to make much money on ads. I’m going to try it out, though, mostly just to see how many pennies it yields.
I installed Google AdSense ads on my blog." class="mt-image-none" height="1389
As explained in the first entry, I bought a microscope mostly so I could look for tardigrades, aka water bears, and hopefully make lovely videos of them. Within hours of getting my scope set up, I managed to find some!
Isolated tardigrade: My first attempt at finding tardigrades and putting them on a slide, using an OMAX M837ZL microscope. This is using a 40X objective and a 14MP camera at the smallest video setting, 1024x822, for faster frame rate.
The microscope I bought arrived, and I spent a day getting familiar with it and the lenses. I was generally pleased, but ended up buying a bunch of new objectives and condensers to see if I could get better images. This post is regarding the initial purchase except the images at the end featuring the darkfield condenser.
First test of the OMAX M837ZL microscope, looking at some local moss associated cells.
It took me a while to locate the manual for my new microscope. I was not surprised to have trouble since the lone Amazon review warned of no manual being provided and a broken link, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be to find the manual online.
My OMAX M837ZL microscope came with a broken CD, but luckily I was still able to get the files off.
As an early birthday present to myself, I bought a microscope despite many other priorities. I’ve spent a few days using it over the past two weeks, and while I have mixed feelings, I don’t regret the purchase.
While waiting for the microscope to be delivered, I searched for moss in the park that overlooks my house from above.
I’ve been getting acquainted with my new microscope and its digital camera software. I initially decided to buy a microscope based mostly on the USB camera resolution finally exceeding a few megapixels without costing thousands of dollars. After these tests, it looks like I may end up not using the USB camera much after all, due to difficulty getting the colors right. Thankfully I decided to try a Nikon SLR adapter, as photos through that look much better!
Stage micrometer viewed through a Meiji plan 40X NA0.65 (spring) 160/0.17 objective lit through an OMAX dry brightfield Abbe NA1.25 condenser captured by a Nikon D800 with AmScope 2X SLR camera adapter
In my endless endeavor to optimize my data storage scheme, I changed my Drobo 5D‘s drive redundancy setting from dual to single, such that I would only be able to sustain one drive failure, but I would gain an extra six terabytes of space. The free space has fallen below 20 percent, and I’ve ready reports of Drobos becoming incredibly slow once past three quarters full. I also had some issues connecting Drobo to Gmail, but got it working using Port 587 and checking the SSL box, despite this being against Google’s documentation.
Update: I’ve settled on a solution using the Creative SB1560 and three audio cables, giving up on optical digital audio.
This week I’ve been trying to get true surround sound from my desktop’s optical digital port. I haven’t been totally successful yet, but I do have a much better understanding of audio formats and channels and and technologies involved. Using Windows, everything works splendidly, but I’m primarily running OS X El Capitan. Needless to say, it’s been frustrating! I currently can only get reliable DTS surround sound using the Plex Home Theater app, but that’s clunky and won’t play any video file like VLC player.
I haven’t written much for a few weeks, but I’m still here. I’ve mostly been trying to focus on the programming projects and not worry about the brain exercises and other tasks, hoping this would be temporary, and soon I could get back to progressing on everything. But of course I have had diversions, both intentional and unexpected. This month my mind has been on relationships. First, romantic ones, and then for the past ten days, on a friend in need. It is on the latter I now write.
The following screenshots were taken within 10 seconds of each other after restarting the AirPort Utility app.
Sometimes launching OS X's AirPort Utility from a wired computer on the network shows a correct layout.
Other times the layout is squashed and therefore I don't have much confidence it's right even when it doesn't look squashed.
My dad shares a lot of posts on Facebook, on a variety of topics. Many are political or gun related, and sometimes the comments are interesting. This was a recent one posted by Tess Taylor on April 23 at 12:26pm PT:
tess_taylor_share.png" class="mt-image-none" height="1304
I started using Runkeeper to track my runs in July 2010, and soon after I started paying $19.99 per year to support the service. The additional features for the money were limited, basically boiling down to some extra charts and a live run feature where others can see your run in real time. This wasn’t as cool as it could be, or even as similar features from competitors. I’ve seen friends using a Nike app, I think, where it would post to Facebook at the start of a run, and the phone would read comments and cheers as friends interacted with the post. As far as I know, Runkeeper never did anything like that. And I’m not sure I would have used it anyway.
Today I received a newsletter from Mapbox that linked to a tutorial for JavaScript based heatmaps. It looks pretty cool, and I wondered how it might look used to plot runs.
I wrote in November about Runkeeper heatmaps and a method to generate images from run data on a computer …
Two of my roommates let me know Friday the Internet sucked in the kitchen. I knew this used to be the case, and I suspected our metal framed kitchen table of causing issues, but I thought it was solved.
I use voice transcription instead of typing quite a bit, and I have for a few years. Often I don’t even bother correcting it, or I only use it for shorter sentences so I can easily see problems and fix them. But I’m trying to use it more …
We’ve had some network issues lately, so I dug out one of the Raspberry Pi Model Bs I got for free from Adafruit with my first couple of orders in September 2013. I then set it up to do network monitoring using Smokeping. Since it takes 10 or 20 seconds to generate the graphs, I switched to a master-slave setup where the graphs could be generated on my web server, but the measurements taken from the Raspberry Pi on my home network.
Since my first programming book 15 years ago, I remember the convention of using extra spaces to align the equal signs in lines of variable assignments. This has been pretty standard in most of the languages I’ve used over the years. It’s not a big deal, but it’s something I do instinctively. I struggle much more with other spacing and indentation issues, and seeking guidance, I read Python’s PEP8. And I’m not sure I like with what I found.
This is just a quick note for future reference. A few friends shared the Medium piece “On Becoming Anti-Bernie” (PDF) by Robin Alperstein. I only read the first few pages, but that much of it basically reflects my sentiment: I love that Bernie is proving many Americans have a strong …
Three months ago, randomly read a book called “The 12 Week Year,” and I decided to start using the system to make sure my time away from work wasn’t wasted, and hopefully establish some routines that would make it easier to be efficient and productive. While I stuck with it in general, I didn’t take it seriously enough to see the major benefits I hoped for. It still helped me be more accountable and better understand my failings, so I will continue with it. I probably need some adjustments; maybe writing this will help.
The final week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 52.3%. Last week I scored 52.2%.
Year 1, Week 12
Again I didn’t stick to my planned schedule well, but I felt reasonably good this past week despite ballooning credit card debt!
I’ve noticed and commented on this many times, so it should probably be documented so I can remember how hard life was in 2016. The customer answers to product questions on Amazon are mostly useless, thanks to a process flaw on Amazon’s part.
The eleventh week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 52.2%. The previous two weeks, I scored 43.3% and 72.7%.
Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.
Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.
One third of four multiplied by three is not four, according to the OS X calculator. I know this quirk is due to behind the scenes floating point arithmetic, but it’s interesting Apple hasn’t found a way to cosmetically fix this considering this calculator might be the most commonly used one in the world!
4/3*3=3.9999999999
I’ve only ready a few stories on the Apple controversy, but I’m increasingly anxious, hoping civil liberties prevail. This is a bit of a journal entry combined with some comments I want to remember, so I’ll give a bit of background in case I read this in …
Week 8 of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 50.4%. This is about the same as last week.
Last month, before I realized there was going to be a thousand GOP and Democratic debates, I was still tuning in to each one, though often late, as they caught me off guard. During the Feb. 6 GOP debate, I actually empathized with Marco Rubio, as several times he seemed to nearly shed tears.
Today, Rubio dropped out of GOP nomination race, finally. Not that Trump or Cruz are any better ideologically, but they at least seem more likely to be able to handle the pressure of the job.
“Government Surveillance” is scary, and a great episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”. The show, from last March, features man on the street evidence Americans are poorly informed about surveillance, as well as an interview with Snowden in which Oliver portrays the government programs in the context of dick pics. This perspective seems to turn the issue from something Americans care little about to something deeply personal and repulsive. (And it isn’t the sending of the dick pics that is repulsive.)
Oliver may have helped build momentum behind this issue by making it personal, but it was still somewhat removed since we don’t know of many specific cases. Now that Apple is very publicly fighting the government on a specific case, I hope more people see the light and unite for civil liberties.
Airport full body scanners see all, but the government says it doesn't keep a copy, just in case.
I signed up for Comcast’s XFINITY Internet service this week, despite a deep seated aversion to contributing to the reign of a giant monopoly. Time will tell if I can live with the decision, but so far, it’s not looking so good. They have already done a hard pull on my credit report illegally, as I did not consent to it and they explicitly told me no such pull would be done since I was paying a $100 deposit. Additionally, the speeds are not as advertised. My attempts so far to deal with both these issues have wasted a lot of time and have been unsuccessful.
Week 7 of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 50.1%. This is much worse than last week.
I began studying Japanese vocab and characters through WaniKani in May 2014, a few months after I moved to Japan. After five months, I wrote about my struggles to get caught up with the program due to intentionally advancing through the levels as quickly as possible to maximize my benefit …
Week 6 of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 85.8%. This is much better than the last two weeks, and might be my best week yet depending how you look at it.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with or thinking about my ex these past few months, so perhaps it isn’t so strange I’ve felt myself falling more and more for him, despite having broken up nearly a year and a half ago.
The fifth week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 56.5%. This is 4.3% lower than last week, which itself was 17.6% lower than the week before‘s 78.4%.
The Apple OS X Messages app stores files sent and received in a folder with a structure that doesn’t lend well to browsing. If you want to separately back up the family photos and videos received via iMessage on your computer, you can use some ideas here to help.
OSX Messages attachments folder" class="mt-image-none" height="602
The third week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 78.4%. This is 20.3% higher than last week‘s 58.1%.
Yesterday I watched the last Democratic and GOP debates, the first such viewing on my part this cycle. It was quite interesting, but I’m not going to go into all that now. This post is just to say, after watching the final GOP debate today, I remembered The Political Compass, a cool website with a tool that graphs you not just on an economic left-right scale, but a social authoritarian-libertarian scale.
Yesterday I watched the last Democratic and GOP debates, the first such viewing on my part this cycle. It was quite interesting, but I'm not going to go into all that now. This post is just to say, after watching the final GOP debate today, I remembered The Political Compass, a cool website with a tool that graphs you not just on an economic left-right scale, but a social authoritarian-libertarian scale.
My political orientation as of January 2016
While I was looking for some old political test results in my files, I stumbled across a font I made of my handwriting in high school. The filename is charlie2006.ttf, though I seem to remember making the font earlier than that. Perhaps I made two. Making that font using some program I don’t remember took many hours of painstaking curve plotting and adjustments, but I figured there might be an easier way now. And sure enough, Google showed me myscriptfont.com.
The automated handwriting font creator from myscriptfont.com is slick, but I needed to redo my scans a few times to make corrections for thickness and more.
In reading the introduction to the Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, I came across the concept “distributed representation.” This idea struck me as parallel to the depiction of genetics in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
Figure 2 from: Asgari E, Mofrad MRK (2015) ContinuousDistributed Representation of Biological Sequencesfor Deep Proteomics and Genomics. PLoS ONE 10 (11): e0141287.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141287" class="mt-image-none" height="602
After an hourlong run and finishing my leftover tostada salad from The Little Chihuahua this afternoon, I noticed out the kitchen window a helicopter flying fairly low over the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco. I didn’t think much of it till I heard it again, and again.
A twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, operated by the Remote Sensing Laboratory Aerial Measuring System from Nellis Air Force Base, heads west over San Francisco Monday, February 1, at 3:37 p.m.
The second week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 58.1%. This is 5.9% lower than last week‘s 64.0%.
The main factors in the lower score were my self imposed oversleeping penalty of 7.8% (calculated based on Fitbit reported waking times …
Deciding how to fix health care is hard enough. But when huge problems I didn’t even know were problems come to light, it makes me wonder how we can ever hope to change. Then again, every problem is a solution waiting for someone to take charge.
In this case, drug shortages could be studied and solved through smart tracking software run by a national health organization or on a smaller scale within a hospital system.
The first week of my first 12 week year is over, and I scored 64.0%. More on that in a bit.
I initially scheduled consistent, solid blocks every day of the week, including the weekends, figuring my routines would get better established if I didn’t take days off. Since I spent much of this week engrossed in microbiome research, I really needed to stretch my biochemistry neurons for the first time in years. Even though that work only totaled about 20 hours, it was somewhat exhausting. I therefore didn’t stick to working all day Saturday and Sunday as planned, and the hours a bit lacking.
My modified calendar after the first 12 week year" class="mt-image-none" height="719
Since I finally separated from the seductively convenient employment I carried on for nearly five years, I now have some time to focus on myself. My back burner has long been stacked high, and some of those pots are surely rotten by now. If I can’t manage to sort through it now that I have the time, then I may truly be hopeless.
Sledding in Truckee, California
Last week I built a hackintosh, and it took a few days of troubleshooting to get the USB ports working properly so I could access all my data, which is stored on a Drobo 5D. I had to wait several days before I could fully access my data, and now it seems I have to wait yet again.
I am not sure what event I have to thank for the current edition of 'data protection', but I am hoping it finishes faster than the 290 hours it initially reported!" class="mt-image-none" height="736
More and more I’ve been thinking about life on this planet. In a strange way, it started with reading “The Untethered Soul” by Michael A. Singer. The book has done wonders to catalyze improving my outlook and thinking, which is a story for another time, but it also made me think about thinking and about what makes us us. In the deepest sense, we are not our bodies, nor are we our thoughts or emotions. Those things all somehow exist in front of us, and we can get involved with them or modulate them or ignore them as we please.
Domingo took this photo one time we went to explore Golden Gate Park. Seeing him up close made me miss my degus!
Since I bought my first (Micron) computer when I was 10, I’ve had a thing for desktops and customizability. I did buy a giant Dell laptop in around 2003, but after that, I always built my own desktops.
Moving across the country in 2012, though, started convincing me to try to make a laptop work as a primary computer. I had to fit everything I owned in a small SUV, and desktops take up a lot of space! MacBook Pros around that time were starting to get sufficiently powerful to use with external monitors and play movies and everything else, so it seemed it was time to chuck the desktop. Also, all the travel I’ve done in the last two years was infinitely more feasible while using a laptop as a primary.
The 2015 MacBook has only one port for USB and power, so you need a special adapter. This one didn't work, though, even to connect to my SSD. The 36 inch cable caused too much power loss to keep the drive connected, and it didn't work at all with the power plugged in. I was only able to access data while using a six inch USB2.0 cable and no power. USB3.0 caused intermittent disconnects.
A month ago I started reading the book “Biocode: the new age of genomics” Yizhen left with me after heading back to Chicago. I posted some comments about the personal genomics section, but then I got super busy with work. (That will not be happening again with that particular job; more on that in a future post.)
Last week I made time to finish the book. First I had to settle on a note taking system, since I knew I would want to remember to some of the people and places and projects mentioned. Lately I’ve been taking notes on paper, especially when listening to audiobooks on planes and places I don’t want to deal with my computer. But clearly I need a digital solution.
A few weeks ago, my Fitbit Charge HR rather quickly deteriorated from needing charging once a week to needing charging every day and a half. Thankfully it was within the one year warranty, and Fitbit pretty easily sent a replacement after I sent an email inquiry. I suppose had it happened just after the warranty ended, I could have gotten a replacement through my credit card warranty service, but it was nice Fitbit didn’t make it a big hassle.
My Fitbit Charge HR after 11 months of use
Tonight we had the first of two annual Christmas celebrations, though this year both will be held in the same house.
One of my work clients is undergoing a migration from Movable Type to WordPress, and the decision was made to change the URL structure of basically every piece of content. While not ideal, this move can make sense, especially if the old structure wasn’t very future proof and started causing duplicate URL conflicts.
I started reading a book Yizhen left on my shelf after he headed back to Chicago to begin his second year at Biocode: The New Age of Genomics, by Dawn Field and Neil Davies, is kind of an overview of the state of biotechnology. I apologize in advance to anyone reading this; I just wanted to make a quick comment about the emotional distress warnings for a Stanford class, but this turned into another train of thought whose course was less direct than anticipated and whose destination was so vague the conductor isn’t even sure if we are there yet.
I don’t have a lot of knowledge of cooking or motivation to drive the the grocery store and plan meals. I therefore have subscribed to farm boxes from Farm Fresh To You on and off while I’ve lived in San Francisco. They delivery fresh produce from local farms, but I also need to figure out what to do with it. And this time, I received some friends!
What a pleasant surprise to find some little slugs dining on the cabbage I was about to put in the freezer. Glad someone could eat it!
I’m having a bit of a moral dilemma dealing with Amazon merchants.
I’m certainly contributing to the demise of small brick and mortar businesses by ordering nearly everything on Amazon. This I know and accept. But to the extent I can help small businesses that do sell on Amazon, I should be happy to. Yet I find myself rarely rating products, and when emailed by the merchants following an order, I find myself only getting annoyed, and never going to rate the product. I don’t know if this is a problem with incentives or presentation on Amazon’s part, or if I am just an evil person. I wouldn’t have a problem rating the products if it were simpler and more part of my usual Amazon process. But the emails just drive me nuts.
I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:
Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.
I have a deeper sense of the truth of, or more certainty of, the notion everyone is equally intelligent. (If I were high or drunk, this increased certainty may not ultimately even be because of smoking pot or drinking, for I could feasibly have arrived at this position by doing the same mental work without pot. But even then, perhaps that work would not have been performed any time soon were it not for the pot.) It’s possible this question might already be answered one way or the other, and I could gain that knowledge simply by reading the right things. But I admitted to myself I don’t have certainty one way or the other, and even knowing the information may already exist, instead of trying to look it up, I reasoned out cases for and against with Mike. After spending several hours in thought experiments, and even without totally proving to myself the truth of the notion, or totally disproving it, I can confidently say I have more respect for the notion everyone might be equally intelligent. Which is to say I can confidently say I believe it more. I could find out tomorrow this has been decidedly proven in the negative, but right now I’m not sure being shown it is false could possibly convince me. I’m not sure it couldn’t, either, though. Perhaps I will feel differently then. Perhaps in that moment I will look back at this as a crazy hallucination, or perhaps I’ll even remember it as a dream. Or perhaps I won’t remember it at all. How can I say with certainty, then, what I am feeling now really means anything at all?
This evening I explained what I believe about evolution, how there are no such things as discrete species (by the same logic, there are no such things as races), but rather those are arbitrary labels for a specific populations of living things who can interbreed at a specific time. When …
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
Walter's cycling heat map
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
This week involved not much more than working 56 hours (unusual), though it was at least in the company of my dog, Vera, since her new owner was out of town.
Work has been pretty crazy lately, as two of my large clients are undergoing migrations and redesigns. One of those launched this week, which went pretty smoothly, but just took a lot of time I didn’t have. The other has a lot of work left, but I hopefully finished most of my role and provided enough documentation for others on my team to fill in the gaps. Time will tell, there. As for me, I supposedly have off two days next week in exchange for the overtime this week, and I am already planning to take off the entire following week to get caught up on personal stuff.
I almost forgot to get a new Adderall prescription this week. I am prescribed one 25mg capsule daily, but because amphetamines are Schedule II drugs, it is somewhat inconvenient to actually obtain what I am prescribed. For most drugs, I can get 90 day prescriptions automatically filled by the mail order pharmacy my insurance uses, OptumRx. The two drugs I take, however, aren’t so easy. (Truvada as PrEP is a story for another time.)
Amphetamine and methylphenidate
Instead of catching up on my photos today, I’ll start gathering some research here regarding ADHD and medications. This isn’t intended to be a cohesive narrative, but a brainstorming work space. It’s public in case it might be of use to someone.
Earlier this year in February, I broke my Nexus 5 screen and opted to buy a new Moto X (2nd gen., XT1095) since I was going to be leaving the country for six months soon, and wasn’t sure if I’d have time to repair it. Since I had to transfer everything to a new phone, I rooted the Android 5.0 installation right away so I could use Titanium Backup, which would supposedly let me do a full backup and transfer in the future without much hassle.
As I neared my home, I spotted another man on the sidewalk ahead. There were no street lights nearby, but I could tell he was middle aged and substantial. The fear crept back, but this time it wasn't a safety fear, but rather a social fear. It was just the two of us. I was determined in my pace, but I also felt drawn to the man's eyes as I approached.
A moment at Burning Man
I initially sat down to write briefly of how I was having an enjoyable morning getting organized and working sporadically on the many things I want to do today: potting plants I bought on Amazon, processing photos from the past several months, and perhaps blogging. This all seems rather trivial considering today we bombed a hospital, yesterday we lost a ship and 33 people to Hurricane Joaquin, Thursday we had a mass shooting, and Wednesday fricken Congress almost shut down the government, again… but you have to make the best of things.
Anyway, I got the idea to take a photo of myself doing work at my desk so I could later reminisce. That wasn’t too difficult, though it did require my “Hobby Creek Helping Hands Third Hand Kit Soldering Tool” to hold my GoPro HERO4 balanced on top of the closet door.
My bedroom, a work in progress
Back on February 19, about six weeks ago, I saw an ad on Facebook for Credible, a company that supposedly helps you consolidate private and government student loans. I had done a consolidation before through the sort of official Education Department route, but only some of my loans qualified, so I was still left with six loan accounts to deal with, ranging from 5 to 6.5 percent interest rates. For a few years they have been on auto pay, so it wasn’t a big deal, but the OCD me would prefer to see just one nice loan account instead of a bunch with weird payment amounts.
Credible claims to solve my “problem” with ease, in just three steps!
Credible marketing" class="mt-image-none
So I filled out the Credible sign up form and waited.
A month ago I wrote about how well my Wealthfront IRA was doing after the first six weeks. Well, I decided to also try one of their competitors, Betterment.
It’s late. I have a morning flight. Time for sleep. And I’ve been trying. My friend, the Buddhist, has long been slumbering, but I stayed up catching up on work. Though I wasn’t at my most productive, I wasn’t really sleepy.
He is beside me, facing away. His left arm decided to go adventuring, and it came to rest across my chest. No big deal; it’s nice to be close, even if it wasn’t a conscious choice. I’ll take what I can get, after all.
Not having had a hamburger for about a week, it was time. I didn’t have to feel bad about it as I usually do, for while I was indeed in a foreign country, the United Kingdom isn’t like China or India, where I should obviously be experiencing something other than a burger.
First London burger. $17 & not so big so hopefully is delicious! Possibly came with an entire bottle of ketchup, which I declined.
Two years ago I stumbled on startup called Wealthfront that automatically invests money for users and seemed to have the lowest fees. It was actually a web development blog post I stumbled on, "Reactive Charts with D3 and Reactive.js" (entry is kind of broken now), but it prompted me to look into the company nonetheless.
Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I found a link to (a blog post linking to) the below video of some boys known as the Rhodes twins, coming out to their father. I wasn’t going to click, as I’ve been experiencing strong overhyped-sentimental-click-baiting fatigue, but then I caved, maybe because they appeared to be cute. What the hell kind of person am I?
This talk was fascinating, and made me think (more!) about my job situation and what I want to do with my life. While Iyer promotes going nowhere, this talk (and his other, “Where is home?“) actually made me think more about whether I want to spend more time living in other countries.
Tim shared with me a post from the blog Nao, which comments on the conflict between China’s working class and the state. The post offers English translations of some of Foxconn laborer Xu Lizhi’s poetry and of his obituary in Shenzhen Evening News. That’s right, Xu is dead, having survived 24 years before taking his life. He followed in the steps of many others, and certainly won’t be the last to do so.
I just read (via Eric) the Salon article “GOP voter ID law gets crushed: Why Judge Richard Posner’s new opinion is so amazing,” which beckoned me to go on and read the dissent in full. I did, and it was indeed entertaining.
I began to study Japanese around 3 p.m. Somehow it is now 3 a.m., and I have barely made any progress on that front. But my mind has been busy nonetheless. The NeoPixels with which I’ve lined my walls along with amazing experimental music (today, newly discovered Ludique) transport my mind and emotions to another world. I highly recommend it.
Five months ago, I started a Japanese vocab and kanji learning program through a website called WaniKani. My brother Tim had been using it for almost a year prior to that, and I wish he had forced me to start using it then. Granted, I didn’t know I was going to Japan quite at that point, but it would be so nice to be nearly done with the program by now!
I received a text via the Google Voice app on my Android phone. It was from my brother Ricky asking for math help. I promptly navigated to http://voice.google.com as usual to load the web interface and respond easier via the computer. Only I was redirected to https://support.google.com/chat/answer/3379791…
18 October 2014 update: This online message thread seems to be exhausted, so I’ll call the Chase Sapphire support line soon and make a meager stab at getting my requests fulfilled, and then I will cancel both cards. I refuse to put up with this BS any longer.
TLDR:
After a long, ridiculous thread, Chase wrote:
Another alternative would be to have the San Francisco Credit Union call our Customer Service number which is listed below. If they can confirm that your checking account ending in
****is open and available for use a request can be submitted to unsuspend your checking account.
Upon having SFFCU do just as requested:
Bobby: Charles, I am on the line with a specialist now and they unfortunately cannot verify any information to me.
Bobby: Is there any way that you an contact them now? they said that a letter would not suffice…, that you the cardholder would need to call. :(
Charles Gorichanaz: I’m not sure why they asked me to have you call them then ! I am about ready to cancel all my accounts with them. I have contacted them six times over this already, and they insist SFFCU needs to contact them.
I finally started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” and toward the beginning he talked about the 250 New York phone book names experiment.
I went through the list (Are You a Connector?) of names and found I knew roughly 72 people with the given surnames.
With the …
As part of my daily struggle to get to work, I watched the new TED talk by Simon Anholt, a policy adviser who “helps national, regional and city governments earn better reputations—not by launching advertising or PR campaigns, but by changing the way they behave.” I thought it was a good way of thinking, and so I can better remember, here are some of my notes, but do watch the video!
I’ve lived in three cities with a large homeless population: Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and especially San Francisco. But somehow I’ve never mustered the courage to strike up a conversation with any people living on the streets. Really, I rarely muster the courage to strike up a conversation with anyone on the street at all. I need to defeat my shyness.
This got me researching later about the party scene in Tokyo. I found many forums with accounts of people doing drugs – specifically, ecstasy or (the better) pure MDMA, which is called "Molly" in the states and "Mandy" in the UK. The general situation in Japan seems to be:
* Japan is one of the strictest countries regarding drug laws, and quantity or intent matter not
* Drugs that do exist here are therefore much more expensive than elsewhere (“The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive nation, Australia.”)
* People don't talk about drugs even if they do them. Similar to elsewhere, but more severe. Apparently many of the population are extremely sensitive about this, due to what I can only imagine is an ingrained sense that breaking rules is wrong (“unconscionable”) and you cannot question the rule's basis. If you even mention drugs, people will stop talking to you and you'll have no friends.
AgeHa
It has been a long road thus far to get decent Internet here in Tokyo. I thought Japan was technologically advanced, but no more.
I spent my first month at a temporary place I found on Airbnb, and prior to booking, I asked the host if he could do a speed measurement on his Internet connection. Instead of doing that, he responded, "The internet connection of here is optical fiber broad band one." Well, it turned out to be fast enough, but not as fast as that "optical fiber" made it sound. My connection there was around 10 megabits down and 2-5 up. Not horrible, for sure. The main problem there is the Internet would cut out periodically, and at least once a day I would have to power down the modem and router to troubleshoot. I really looked forward to getting an actual apartment and my own Internet service!
A plastic cable the Internet installation people used to try to get the fiber optic cable to pull through wherever it comes from
I've been using Basecamp's web based service for a few days now to organize projects for my new position at Six Apart, and it's generally worked well, but there are a bunch of things I find lacking after my experiences with the more robust ActiveCollab.
My Basecamp setup
Twenty one months in San Francisco to the day, and I've decided to move on, for now. I still do not feel like I am really moving away, but the magnitude of this all is finally starting to sink in. I intended to write and reflect earlier, but 20 minutes before my flight boards is better than never.
I loved that most of "Inception" seems plausible due to one new thing taken for granted in the movie itself. In this case, that new thing is the device that links sleepers via some medical tubes such that they can share dreams. This is great because it doesn't strike me as being impossible. Humans do not fully understand how the brain functions in sleep; we don't even know the purpose of dreaming. That makes every crazy thing in "Inception" seem as though it could happen, possibly in the near future. Or maybe it's already happened?
"Inception" provokes many questions about the way our minds work and about what's possible
Overall, I feel left out of the conversation, as Spotify is not very forthcoming about how it uses your connection. The only mention I can find in their help documents is a question "How much disk space and bandwidth does Spotify use?" where it states without answering the question:
To reduce download data, increase the cache size. To reduce upload data, reduce the cache size.
Or, just block Spotify from uploading and leave your cache alone, and Spotify will respond much faster and allow your household to enjoy the Internet again. And Backblaze can resume uploading my data. :-)
I'm running a fresh installation of OSX Mavericks on my MacBook Pro. My mobile phone is an Android, and I listen to music exclusively with Spotify. I therefore believe I have no need for iTunes, and wanted to remove it. OK.
sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app
Not so simple.
I order a ton of stuff via Amazon’s "1-Click" ordering, and unfortunately Amazon does not give you the option to choose a specific courier for the shipment. If they did, I would ban USPS and FedEx from ever handling my shipments.
I never receive packages shipped via FedEx or USPS, and always receive UPS and Ontrac packages on the first attempt. How is it that the doorbell never works for two couriers? Or perhaps they don’t even bother ringing me.
I’ve watched this video twice now, and for some reason it made me decide to write little blogs about videos I watch that make me think. This is mostly so I can review the thoughts I took from the video, hopefully helping me internalize them.
I stumbled on this one while watching a TED series called “Lifehacks” on Netflix with Travis, and it turned out more interesting than I thought it would be at first.
I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.
My Weatherbit chart
Charlie Gorichanaz's ancestry composition according to 23andMe's “speculative estimate”
Charlie Gorichanaz's ancestry composition according to 23andMe's “standard estimate”
Barely two days after I posted about my new gym lifestyle, the Fitness SF website got replaced Feb. 14 with a cutting open letter from the company's former designer, Frank Jonen.
"Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them. As a result this website is no longer operational," Jonen wrote.
Screen Shot 2013-02-15 at 11.53.24.jpg
I was setting up a search domain last night, and went to bed while the latest draft of my SDF file generated. This morning I tried to upload it on the "Create a New Search Domain" dialog, and got this new error.
Amazon CloudSearch's "Create New Search Domain" dialog. I didn't take a screen shot of the error, though. :-(
I didn’t finish this book, but I started these notes:
Book notes:
ijtihad, Islam’s tradition of independent reasoning, requires being familiar with Islam’s latest thinkers
The Prophet Mohammad reportedly said religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. There’s a distinction between Islam as an …
I need to stop taking naps midday. Or stop being tired midday. Or something. But I hate just getting to work in the afternoon! When I could be almost done for the day!
I started using the app Sleep Cycle last night. We’ll see.
I just sent this e-mail to my dad, but decided to add it here:
I am not one of the people who think Obama was born in Kenya (and not sure if I care), but this Reuters article is interesting, detailing basically the same controversy in the past and on …
While I was searching for electronic formats of my printed books, I stumbled on the book “Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age” by Paul Graham, published by O’Reilly and copyright 2004. I started reading it on a whim and basically got sucked in, reading on the plane and in between things for the past two days. About 250 pages later, I’m antsy to program and move to San Francisco more than ever! But first I’ll take a minute to recall the parts of the book I most want to remember before I don’t.
Mom lent me the book "Anything You Want" a few months ago, and I finally lay down to read it. Overall I liked it a lot. It's in line with my recent endeavors to reduce my belongings and simplify things. I own way more crap than I should, and motivated by my impending transplant across the country, I've been finding it quite rewarding to get rid of stuff.
About 110 books and 50 DVDs, rendered unnecessary after digitization. Awesome!
Last Tuesday, Josh made me watch a movie with him, "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead." Apparently he thought it was about steroid abuse for the sake of muscle gain or something, and it turned out to be quite a different movie. But we both loved it nonetheless.
Half a bag of baby carrots, four small red apples, a cucumber, four stalks of celery, six leaves of kale, some ginger and a lemon
I started using Google's Picasa to manage my photos probably two years ago when I learned of its awesome facial recognition feature to largely automate tagging people. Then when I discovered Alan Lundeen's plugin to automate uploading to Facebook, life was blissful.
Picasa Uploader for Facebook
I've never been one to use the same, simple password for everything, like many FBI agents and possibly 92 percent of Sony customers. For the better part of a decade, my strategy was to use a ridiculously long "secure" password for important sites, and a simple (but nondictionary) password for the rest. Then a number of years ago I switched to the much more robust strategy of using a complex sequence combined with parts of the website name following some formula. I didn't want to make it too complicated, though, so I limited the password to eight characters, as one of my banks had this limit on passwords.
Capital One password restrictions
This was written by Cassie W of Hartford Union High School
Hello Fellow Myspacers,
What will you be doing in 60 days? You probably dont know. You probably dont really care. November 7th, 2006 is just another day that you have to go through. But its not. Its so much …
Message to Joey on MySpace:
well, my view is that i’m all for anything that increases awareness - especially when it’s positive. i even like when religious protesters hold a rally - but this is even better, because many people admire him. this is an issue that I think will …
I have now abandoned my www.MySpace.com blog, because it sucked! This one will be so much better once I get it set up - now I just need to move all of my MySpace.com blogs….
I am me! I’m also a scientist minded software engineer who loves reading, running, listening to music, and recording photos and videos and data of all sorts. After earning a biochemistry degree, I lived in San Francisco and Tokyo, and now I find it difficult to stay put. Read more about me and my online life.
SF: 87% complete; Oakland: 27%
San Francisco Bay Area running progress
Charlie says: “What a wonderful region!”
30 November 2022
In-N-Out Burger (Fast Food Restaurant)
333 Jefferson St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “It was super hot and we got a taste for salty fries, but by the time we walked there it dropped 35° and was cold. Still tasted good!”
28 September 2020 at 20:32
Taqueria Zorro (Mexican Restaurant)
308 Columbus Ave , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Restaurants are hoppin’ around here, feels weird.”
26 September 2020 at 19:42
碼頭老火鍋 (Hotpot Restaurant)
仁愛路四段409-1號 , Da’an District , T’ai-pei Shih
Charlie says: “Delicious spicy hot pot with Harry. I am so full!!”
25 March 2020 at 08:40
桶好呷滷味 (Asian Restaurant)
, Taipei
Charlie says: “We pick a representative set of ingredients and they build out the rest into a braised soup like thing over noodles.”
23 March 2020 at 06:46
Addiction Aquatic Development (上引水產) (Fish Market)
民族東路410巷2弄18號 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Standing sushi bar at a fish market.”
21 March 2020 at 07:03
ACME Breakfast CLUB (Breakfast Spot)
3F., No. 10, Ln. 27, Chengdu Rd., , Taipei
Charlie says: “Brunch w/ Shawn! Was tempted to get the avocado toast kind of as a joke since I never get it in SF, but resisted, sourdough was good. :-)”
20 March 2020 at 22:27
三甲和風創意料理 (Japanese Restaurant)
Charlie says: “Late dinner with Shawn, at a lovely place!”
20 March 2020 at 09:28
中央藝文公園 Central Culture Park (Park)
北平東路與紹興北街口 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Social distance.”
20 March 2020 at 03:42
虎頭山環保公園 (Scenic Lookout)
Charlie says: “Exploring the hillside in Taoyuan City.”
14 March 2020 at 23:49
Abura-Ya (Japanese Restaurant)
362 17th St , Oakland , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Beam before Sarah McLachlan!”
24 February 2020 at 18:55
Ramen Yamadaya (Ramen Restaurant)
1728 Buchanan St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with John and Alan”
04 January 2020 at 19:19
Taraval Okazu Ya Restaurant (Sushi Restaurant)
1735 Taraval St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Alan and Emre”
28 December 2019 at 21:59
Tselogs (Filipino Restaurant)
11B San Pedro Rd , Daly City , CA
Charlie says: “John wanted to take me to a Filipino place. It was a quiet night but good food!”
30 November 2019 at 17:43
Golden Gate Bridge (Bridge)
Golden Gate Brg S , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Visiting the bridge with Jay, whom I have not seen in years. Time flies when you don’t slow it down.”
16 November 2019 at 16:22
Buckhorn Grill (BBQ Joint)
619 Market St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Beam! And needed somewhere I can pull out my laptop since I'm on call today and it's been a bit crazy.”
19 September 2019 at 18:54
Tank Hill Park (Park)
Clarendon Ave , San Francisco , CA
23 June 2019 at 19:26
Cafe Bavaria (German Restaurant)
7700 Harwood Ave , Wauwatosa , WI
Charlie says: “Nice puffy pot pie dinner with Tim and Mom”
19 June 2019 at 16:50
Spring Shabu Shabu (Hotpot Restaurant)
, Boston , MA
Charlie says: “Delicious last night in Boston!”
14 June 2019 at 19:14
Taiyaki NYC - Boston (Ice Cream Shop)
119 Seaport Blvd Ste B , Boston , MA
Charlie says: “Post team lunch snack.”
12 June 2019 at 10:11
Aceituna Grill (Mediterranean Restaurant)
57 Boston Wharf Rd , Boston , MA
Charlie says: “Falafel plate with tabbouleh and moussaka”
11 June 2019 at 09:35
Twin Peaks Summit (Hill)
100 Christmas Tree Point Rd , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “#walkSF to work day!”
10 April 2019 at 08:51