29 july 2018
Last night I was playing around with Chafa, an application that renders ImageMagick-compatible graphics in the terminal using a wide range of Unicode characters and ANSI escape sequences to get a surprisingly good reproduction of the images. My favorite result was from an edited and recolored image I made from a photo in the catalogue entry for my favorite piece in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a 12th-century wood sculpture of the Amida Buddha. I saved the result of displaying this file in the terminal to a file I can display without access to Chafa or the original image, just using cat; I even configured my personal laptop to display this file in every new terminal window. I also made the mistake of trying to share the file with other tilde.town users via wall; what happened was that a lot of escape sequences and Unicode character code points, over 30 kB worth, were broadchast to all logged in tide.town users. Sorry about that.
We're going to be spending about half a week in Philadelphia as a family soon; it's basically an annual trip we've made a few times now. I don't think I can reasonably expect to get work done there for my internship, so I've announced it at work as time off and I'm hoping I'll manage to relax somewhat while we're there and enjoy the city.
Last time I was in Philadelphia, unlike this time, my mother was there too. We went out for a walk with my child in a stroller, and the child fell asleep less than a mile from the Liberty Bell, I decided we should go there, as my mother had mentioned a number of times that she'd had a strong desire to see it. The security regime for anyone approaching the bell is about the same as in any commercial US airport, which is to say it was an enormous hassle, and by the time we were standing in front of the bell my mother was almost too peeved about getting jostled and yelled at by all these Appointed Guardians of the Liberty Bell that she almost didn't appreciate seeing it.
It's been my experience that traveling to Philadelphia from here with a small child is… potentially stressful, for sure, but we've met a lot of good people there in the past, and we've had some really good food. I'm hopeful that we'll find some of what we need there this year, both practically and… spirtually? That's pretty much what's happened in the past.