~mozz@TTBP

19 november 2019

I don't believe that Free Software (tm) has built up the good will and social capital that is often alleged by its advocates.

For non-technical end users, free software is equated with freeware aka "free as in beer". And surely, if you have no intent to read or modify the source code for an application, that's all that Free Software boils down to. Nobody but a small fringe are using Libre Office because of freedom, they're using it because they don't want to pay for MS Office.

For developers, there is definitely some good will and social capital towards permissive licenses like MIT and BSD. But I would argue that this does not extend to GPL. In fact, most developers outside of the FSF cult do not like working with GPL dependencies because they restrict their own freedoms to produce and distribute software. I certainly have no good will towards GPL, I avoid it whenever possible.

29 june 2019

Fridays are nice.

26 june 2019

When I'm browsing GitHub, I'll often click on the websites that developers put in their profiles. Most of these personal sites fall into one of the following categories:

The domain name was registered but the site doesn't exist.
The site is a single-page splash screen with the developer's name and links to their social media accounts.
The site is a half-finished attempt at using a static site generator. There's no real content so it looks phoned-in and incomplete.
The developer made a couple of technical blog posts back in 2016 and then stopped. Probably because they discovered that writing technical blog posts isn't very fun.

Maybe 1 in 10 developer sites contain anything interesting at all.

25 june 2019

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would
if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

23 june 2019

I cleaned out my gutters today for the first time in a long while. I climbed up on the roof with my leafblower and blew them right out of the gutter and onto the yard below. I felt pretty cool (lol). My neighbor noticed me and shouted at me to be careful.

The smell was disgusting. Decomposing leaves smell like straight up poop.

20 june 2019

Chicken is by far the hardest meat to grill. Compare it to steak:

Undercooked Steak: Flavorful and delicious
Undercooked Chicked: Slimy E. coli
Medium Steak: Melts in your mouth
Medium Chicken: Tastes like chicken
Overcooked Steak: Smother it is steak sauce, still great
Overcooked Chicken: Like eating a mouthful of sand

The only redeeming quality of chicken is that it's damn good in the fryer.

Signed,

The Midwestern USA

17 june 2019

My 2015 MacBook Pro is slowly dying on me. Something weird is going on with the charger, where it says it's fully charged even though the battery is at 0%. I couldn't get it to work all weekend, and it was stressing me out that I couldn't water my botany plant! I hope it holds out a little while longer. I do really love this laptop. I use it for work, and everything is setup just the way that I like it.

12 june 2019

Lately I've been ramping up my daily caffeine intake. I know that relative to some other people, I'm still considered a lightweight. But I'm at the point where I'm noticeably more tired and irritable if I don't have my daily cup of coffee. It didn't used to be that way.

I feel like I need to drink more water.

10 june 2019

My first plant just matured in botany. Booyah!

It's now a "common mature fern". Not very exciting, I know. I've decided to name her Ann, after George Michael's girlfriend in Arrested Development. "Who, her?".

09 june 2019

I spent the weekend playing Star Tropics, an old adventure game for the NES. I had never heard of it before and went in having no expectations. It has turned out to be a surprisingly fun game so far.

The style and gameplay are similar to the original Zelda. Instead of a sword, you get a little yo-yo thing called a "star thrower". I think the storyline is actually a lot more interesting than Zelda was. So far I've rescued a dolphin, woken up a king's daugher, been swallowed by a whale, and had a fortune teller transform me into a woman (with a masculine voice) to sneak into a castle.

07 june 2019

I now have an account on tildes.net and I've been posting a few things there. It seems pretty nice so far. Slow moving, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. ~town is also slow moving.

I noticed that I had a feels entry from a few days ago that was only the letter "q". Must have been my incompetence when I was trying to exit VIM. It has been buried. I like the idea of being able to "bury" feels. This little command line app has a lot more to it than meets the eye.

05 june 2019

I have a hard time communicating with strangers over email.

It always takes me the whole day to compose a long-form response to somebody. I get worried about the wording, or if the tone is too informal, or if I'm ranting and including unnecessary information that the other person won't care about. So I end up going back to it and tweaking phrases, updating the tense, throwing out sentances. As a result, I often have weird grammatical errors because I've re-written something but missed updating a word here or there.

I don't have that problem on this blogging platform. Maybe because I'm not communicating with anyone specifically, and I don't expect people to respond to what I say here. It's a lot less stressful anyway.

04 june 2019

I shut down development on RTV last night.

https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/issues/696

Everyone was overwhelmingly kind and supportive. It's nice to have that weight off my back.

31 may 2019

Sometimes my mind goes into overdrive in the middle of the night. I start thinking about something very intensely and can't turn it off. This never happens during the day, only after 11:00PM.

Thankfully for me, it's rare enough that I have never felt the need to seek out help or medication. But I sympathize with those people who have a more permanent version of this condition.

30 may 2019

Rain. Coffee. Cat. Neon. Vines. Chill. Hum.

29 may 2019

How to browse Reddit is 2019 (for masochists):

Only follow large, popular subreddits that garner lots of upvotes (/r/popular, /r/all).
Skim until you find a sufficiently controversial and/or upsetting headline.
Go straight to the comments. Don't bother clicking the article link, it's probably nothing but fluff and ads anyways.
Scroll down until you find a comment that matches your preformed opinion on the topic.
Follow along with the comment chain and have a pretend argument in your head.
Do this for around 10-20 minutes, then go back to step 2 and repeat.

Remeber!!! It doesn't matter what the topic is, the important thing is that someone else is wrong and should feel bad about it.

God, I hate Reddit.

28 may 2019

Sometimes at work, it's nice to be able to pound through a bunch of simple or mindless tasks. I don't have to work very hard, yet I feel super productive.

27 may 2019

Fired up the grill for the first time this season and made some tasty brats.

These past few weeks I've been on a tear creating new content, mainly on my gopher site. I think that this spurt of creativity and motivation is finally starting to slow down. Oh well, I'm going to try to keep this feels blog going for as long as I can at least. I can't let my two readers down!

26 may 2019

Two people sent me SMS messages yesterday. Hello, strangers!

25 may 2019

If you're reading this, send a text message to +16164468457 with the word "monkey".

I will respond with the word "bananas".

Afterwards, I will delete your number and never text or call you again.

24 may 2019

Small, incremental improvements > large, sweeping changes. (in software, at least)

23 may 2019

botany on ~town is an awesome little single-purpose app.

It gives me a reason to login every day, which subsequently gives me a reason to add an entry to my feels.

22 may 2019

I have a beer (pineapple fight milk) in the fridge that I've been looking forward to all day. It's the simple things in life that make the biggest difference.

21 may 2019

I feel somewhat embarrassed that I don't know any of the commands for IRC.

In reality, there's no reason that I should know how to use IRC. But it feels like one of those things that every programmer is supposed to have innate knowledge of, like how to use mailing lists (which I also suck at).

20 may 2019

The weather is crappy today, and my dog just gave me a sad look from across the room because he knows I'm not planning on taking him for a walk.