~balise's blog (powered by TTBP)



05 july 2024

Went for a 25-minute run this morning, keeping the slower pace I found on Monday. And, it actually went well. The past two runs were "... okay, it seems I can actually NOT hate this". It's a bit hard to make my brain shut up on the whole "... you're making exactly 0 effort, what the fuck are you happy/proud of", but having reasonably precise HR measurement on the Garmin seems to be enough to call it on its bullshit. Fingers crossed that it continues being enough.

I'm also almost done with my "running audiobook", namely How To Invent Everything, by Ryan North, and it's a 12.5-hour book, so that's a neat way to have some idea of the amount of time I ran overall in recent memory.

Somehow I'm very happy that my town "botany" plant is a fern. It just makes my heart go "wheeeee!".

Had a nice game night, we played The Crew and coinche, it was fun. And I did manage to get 2 scoops of ice cream instead of 3 at the ice cream shop, which I'll count as a victory (banana brownie + jogurt redcurrants is a winning combination.)

permalink



04 july 2024

Started the day in a small wiki edit rabbit hole about art history, of all things - saw a thing on Mastodon about Claude Mellan, a 17th century engraver; went to Wikipedia, saw a "citation needed"... and fixed that (including the actual statement needing a citation.) Obviously this also included "how do I make a reference to a book chapter" template side-quest, and all of that. Fun, but now I need coffee :P

That was a surprisingly productive day. I submitted two patches, learnt stuff about an extension and an API to do something I wanted to do (but hadn't dug into yet), and I fiddled with a third bug, for which I hope to be able to make some progress tomorrow. Oh, and I closed this week's deployment task since it was all good. And all of that while fighting some fight about some administrative stuff. A good day, overall.

I had opened a Bookwyrm account a week or so ago, to try it as an alternative to GoodReads. First time I tried, the import was temporarily closed, so I could not import my stuff to test. Today, the import work, so I gave it a try. I do get that the decentralized nature of the network makes it Hard™ to have a single "source of truth" for the items (books, authors, collections) of the catalogue - and, in all fairness, GoodReads is not perfect on that point either (I may or may not have asked for librarian status on GoodReads for this exact purpose of merging things that are supposed to go together.) But it feels like it makes the whole system, at the very least, very very clunky to use? I don't know if I'm missing something obvious, or if it's just Not Usable For My Brain (wouldn't be the first thing) - I asked on Mastodon, we'll see.

Writever

The word for today's Writever was "build".


Compiling light            ##### 100%
Testing light              ##### 100%
Compiling planets          ##### 100%
Testing planets            ##### 100%
Creating all living things ##### 100%
Testing all living things  ##### 100%
Compiling eternal life     ## 40% - ERROR - Build failed - Missing ';' at line 9210912093

permalink



03 july 2024

Went to training with Paula this morning. The circuit was

I am: tired. But I'm excessively pleased by the fact that I can still deadlift 40kg, I didn't think I still had that capacity. And, turns out... not only I do, but I could have lifted heavier.

But, I should definitely have showered just when I was coming home rather than having lunch first. Because my whole afternoon kind of got fucked by "... but I need to shower first", and I'm still in my bathrobe at 5PM. Oops.

Prepared the tax declaration documents, wooo! Always a bit brain-complicated for REASONS, but there, it's almost done (I only miss a paper that I asked for.)

Writever

Writever today is "Margins"

"Isn't it weird that life on Ægir is entirely aquatic, and that nothing apparently ever got the idea of conquering their continents?

— It's not that weird if you consider the geology of it. Here on Earth, our plates are well behaved, we have continental margins between the continental and oceanic crust, so the transition is, in practice, reasonably smooth. On Ægir, it just... drops abruptly. Or, from the Ægian perspective, their world is surrounded by huge walls.

— It's still weird they went to space before exploring their surface.

— And as weird for them it took us so long to explore the depths of our oceans..."

I'm cheating a bit: this is a bit longer than the one I posted on Mastodon, due to my server's character count constraints. But, I like it better this way :)

permalink



02 july 2024

Today did NOT start well. I modified the notification settings of my phone (went from "full silent mode" to "do not disturb with exceptions"), which threw me into a bad "things are changing and maybe i didn't configure things correctly and everything breaks and and and", which was not great. On top of that, Pierre's computer's PSU died last night - which sucked, obviously, but which sucked doubly because our beloved Mastodon client was hosted on it too. So, that was the second thing that fucked up my morning habits... and that was before coffee. Follows: overwhelm about the things to do (breakfast, dishes, shower, fetching a parcel downstairs) and its order, and... well, brain full of bees.

THANKFULLY, somehow I managed to remember the existence of my weighted blanket, so I put myself under it, and instantly things got... better. That was unexpectedly magical, tbh. After a few minutes, I went from "screeching mode" to "talking myself into an order to do things", and then I executed the plan, and I was able to reboot my morning. Phew.

I went into a large rabbit hole at work today, started wanting to find the origins of a bug, ended up exploring (and putting breakpoints) in 4 code repositories in 2 languages. I think I know what's happening, and it should be fixable with relatively little effort and side effects, but that was kind of exhausting. Maybe (:thinking_face:) I should have taken a bit more breaks, especially considering the start of the day!

My favorite duo of romance authors, collectively known as Kit Rocha, are currently running their "Romancing the Vote" auction, benefiting voting orgs in the US (with options for non-US folks buying stuff too!)

There's a lot of stuff - signed and annotated copies of books, jewelry, stickers, hand-crafted stuff, video consults, various editing services - a wealth of stuff, really. The collective effort that goes behind the scene of this thing absolutely warms my heart.

Writever

Writever for today is "Collective".

Esteemed gaggle of colleagues, the incorporation of our planet to the Federation gives us the unique opportunity to discuss collective names for our new associates. The Greys are delighted with "a grisaille of Greys"; the Mantids prefer "a vigil of Mantids" over "a congregation of Mantids" and that's fine for us; however the Blue Avians are afraid that "a murder of Blue Avians" would be somewhat derogatory. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

A very neat article about busy beavers - Turing machines with a small number of rules that run for a long time (while still halting) - apparently a group just proved the finding of the 5th busy beaver (longest execution of a Turing machine with 5 rules): https://www.quantamagazine.org/amateur-mathematicians-find-fifth-busy-beaver-turing-machine-20240702/

permalink



01 july 2024

Books

I finished Books and Broadswords, by Jessie Mihalik. I didn't know these were actually two novellas in the same universe (with a cross-over in the epilogues), which would have been great... except I liked the first one more than the second one. Still, it was a fun read, and managed to get my head out of gesticulates wildly things last night - not bad!

Next on the list is Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, by Hwang Bo-Reum.

Went for another 22-minute run this morning to ACTUALLY DO THE RUN that I had to interrupt on Friday. It went well, and at no point did I actually feel out of breath. Which, on the one hand, may be a sign that I don't push enough (and my Garmin with its "unproductive" flag tends to agree - fuck you Garmin), but on the other hand, well, I'll take "not feeling like I'm dying", thank you very much. And it's also a large sign of progress that I am able to actually run without feeling out of breath, even if I'm slow as fuck. This was absolutely not the case a few months ago, even at the slowest pace I could manage.

I was somewhat dissociated during the whole run, but a/ it actually makes things easier b/ I can detect it and snap out of it when I'm back home, so I'm going to say I don't see the harm in that.

Pierre came with me again today, which was nice!

Writever

I decided I'm going to try to do July Writever this month, starting with the first word today "Psy" (the list is translated from French, and both lists are subtly different... which I like :). Without further ado:

Psy (noun): unit of measurement of mental pressure. 1 psy is equal to 6,895 xaviers.
Etymology: from psychic; wordplay on psi, equal to 6,895 pascals.

I'll put these on my Scribbles at some point, but it seems like it also belongs in feels, so there it is.

Went to choir this evening - the mix of "a bunch of new pieces" and "my voice is currently fucked" was NOT a pleasant one. But it was nice seeing the people, at least :)

I posted on AlphabeticalZürich for the first time in what feels like ages - yay! Also, they updated the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons, and now the wikidata/structured data information is input in the same tab as the rest of the info. And I like that a lot better!

permalink