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On Linked I took the plunge and added a part-time job I'm taking on to my list of jobs: the adjunct-instructor'ing I'll be doing next quarter at the Computer Systems Institute in Charlestown.

It should be some interesting times and good filler in my CV for this period, but it's not providing a livable wage. (Would be like an ideal role for quasi-retirement, but I'm not stocked up for that yet, for sure) Since it's just teaching in the evening, I will be able to keep up my search for a real programming gig, and even take a fulltime role on as long as it has a modicum of time flexibility.

But It will be a sacrifice because I won't be able to attend band practices for a bit, unless we find some kind of time and space workaround for my group.

Which brings me to this Atlantic article
The Joy of Underperforming (gift link, so you should be able to read it). It's about thinking in terms of "seasons". "This Too Shall Pass" stuff.

(In a random email my comic artist collaborator James Harvey wrote "Sorry you're unemployed at the moment. It will get better soon!" - a sentiment not grounded in much save a general, somewhat optimistic knowledge that most conditions are fleeting, but somehow still is heartening.)

The article digs into letting some things go (at least temporarily) during such times, so seeing how that kind of foretold my course with my band there hit home - especially since band has been one of the consistently nurturing and joyous and reassuring things for me during this whole time.

Like I mean this could be mostly "just" a tough season, the big wheel of fiscal fate turning with me at the bottom in a way it hasn't save 2001 and 2008.... the recession-resisting low interest rate cheap money made quarantine a boom time in tech that I was barely aware of, and now there's this MASSIVE hangover - but largely industry specific. If you're on the outside looking in you're joined by legions of smart eager folks. (And it certainly raises any imposter syndrome that might be murmuring in your ear to shouting levels.) Plus so many companies are trepidatious with a middling general economic outlook, and with a kind of fad among CEOs trying to look smart by cutting cutting cutting.

So the events could also have aspects of a climate shift - maybe AI and 2020's sudden jolt (demonstrating the potential "remote"-ability of a lot of tech jobs) is a seachange. But there could still be a sense of seasons within that - like even ice ages had their summers, just like our heating up planet has its winters.

In any case Melissa and I are not in dire straits. I'm at Plan D or E and can probably go pretty far down the alphabet before radical life changes are mandated, though I think I've lost some of my rosier retirement hopes I was hearing 5 years ago. But any season shift can't happen soon enough for my liking...

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ahaha f*** eric clapton Went back to play original NES Super Mario Brothers, a game I'm not sure I've actually ever beaten, making heavy use of Switch's "rewind" feature. I had forgotten how unforging it was - probably the origin of "Nintendo Hard", the weird bad synergy between "Arcade games give you 3 lives and entertainment to fill those little bursts" and "home games now can and should have a lot of content and give many hours of playtime to make up their cost".

I gave up on world 7-4, which is a weird, unmarked puzzle that feels like an infinite loop but actually you have to take certain top or bottom paths or something. (I thought only the final 8-4 level did that.)

Supposedly the "All Star" version added in audio feedback to tell the player they chose the correct or incorrect path, but it left me with this:

Hot Take: Donkey Kong is a much better game than Super Mario Brothers. As a nation, I don't believe we pay enough attention to the fact that in "Rocky III" Rocky fought a character played by Hulk Hogan. And that that character was named "Thunderlips".

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Winner of 2019 Optical Illusion of the Year:

(via)
It reminds me of this illusion, the Jail Cell from Superman II:

(the two tilted empty discs aren't nearly as amazing a special effect as they first look- they are locked together always touching at the same point, and then the whole shebang is rotating as one thing - I've seen a real life version of that with tires, quite a striking illusion!)

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"No thanks, I'd prefer not to."

Was thinking about that line in my own moral framework. Sometimes I'm clearly something of a self-indulgent kid, other situations, I feel like I have no standing to say no to something just because I'd rather do something else. Usually I can rationalize any refusal down to some other benefit I'm pursuing.

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Sometimes I look at the 40-odd items on my todo list, including some things months old, and I think of the London fatberg...
Boston area reminder: sure days like today aren't necessarily fun, and "oh but we LIKE a place with seasons" may just be what gets us through the (long dark) night but without this the city would be even more overpopulated with college kids who'd have even less incentive to leave. So... hooray?

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Pretty good blog to read along with my Lego Star Wars advent calendar this year. They also have it for previous years: 2014 and 2015

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advent day 17

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I wrote a final wrapup entry to that type-in games of Compute's Gazette blog I did last fall.
advent day 17

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How satisfying is it to see your book prominently placed on the counter of the comics shop you've been frequenting for decades? ( The Million Year Picnic )

PRETTY SATISFYING!

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Is it perverse to be critiquing 30 year old computer menus?

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At Saturday's big Climate, Justice, Jobs rally, JP Honkers Chet and Sandie...

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Oh man Stop and Shop has a lot of types of Progresso soups @ $1 down from the usual $3... I'm stocking up for winter like a hoarder!

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The gulf between words and thoughts is unbridgeable, and yet we must bridge it constantly.

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The New Yorker is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilization. The other two are, of course, Some Like It Hot and the iPhone.

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In wars it is the minorities that are generally right.

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The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.

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You know the music, time to dance.

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Reading the terrific comic "Andre the Giant: Life and Legend".

I had no idea Hulk Hogan's character's name in Rocky III was "Thunderlips". That's... kind of hilarious.
advent day 17

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EdX and the trouble getting employers to take online education seriously. This strikes me as sad. The modern university system is such a high bar.

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from National Geographic

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The genius of Star Trek is that it is about us, but we're probably the Romulans.

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BEE!

advent day 17

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Via Cordelia, Another bit of childhood lore shattered:

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Great New Yorker piece on artificially made languages (ConLangs), particularly Ithkuil. (Though I think the goal of removing redundancy from language is a fool's errand... but maybe a worthy thought-sharpener.)

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Sometimes lately I've been feeling nervous, like my whole life is a sinking ship. Then I remember that's the human condition: the ship has always been sinking since it left the dock. So now I can stop and relax and enjoy the Orchestra's fine rendition of "O Nearer My God to Thee".

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http://www.correlated.org/631 In general, 40 percent of people would rather play a tuba than a bass drum in a marching band. But among those who know what their Myers-Briggs personality type is, 52 percent would rather play a tuba.

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I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

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When the red red robin comes bob-bob-bobbin' along, there'll be no more sobbin'- just the screams.

Well, maybe then some sobbin'. So my buddy JZ managed to get his boss' awesome Celtic season tickets for a night.

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Company's cafeteria is featuring an "unbelievable!" shrimp-and-crab-stuffed-in-cod dish. It's the turducken of the sea!

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those who make videogames are engaged in the important task of teaching people and machines to play with one another.

A while back (October 1999) I started making the "kirkarchive", an HTML-ish way of keeping track of some stuff I didn't really have a use for but didn't want to lose.

For wont of something better to post today, I've decided to start making the kirkarchive online. And what better way than with these early 90s handdrawn icons I made when I was webmaster of Tufts' compsci department's domain...

Computer Engineering

Class Listing

Computer Science

Electrical Engineering

Software

Students at CS

Staff at CS

Help

link to Tufts (1)

link to Tufts (2)

link to Earthcom

link to ICCI conference

The leftmost green figure in "Staff at CS" is actually an almost-recognizable version of Professor Schmolze, who tragically died in 2006.

Some of the props seem kind of well-done to me, but I get better results these days by doodling larger and then shrinking... less pixel-y, and this isn't very good pixel art.

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Quote of the Moment

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

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Good evening; dropped of 8-days-of-hannukah-ginger-beer, did a UU covenant group on holidays+meaning, celebrated at bar for friends new job

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No matter how interesting the people in pictures from parties I threw years ago, I'm just as or more interested in the layout and decoration

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So Apple made some nifty new bass-y earbuds. With a built in mic. But, technically, not for iPhone... volume control won't work etc. Eh?

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Wow, $10 for 10 minutes of massage at Burlington Mall.... so damn worth it. So there's that old kid's rhyme:

It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
Went to bed
Bumped his head
And couldn't get up the next morning...

I was fascinated by this as a kid, the whole bed-going, head-bumping scenario. Except I learned it as "couldn't get up until morning" which isn't such a bad thing, come to think of it. It made it more of an understated tableau.

The "correct" version makes a little more sense, but at least the old guy is still alive, as witnessed by his snoring.

(Do people in comas, head-trauma-induced or otherwise, snore? Or does it tend to be a different style of breathing?)

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Joke of the Moment

Two cows are standing in the pasture. One turns to the other and says, "Although pi is usually abbreviated to five numbers, it actually goes on into infinity."
The second cow turns to the first and says, "Moo."

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Accomplishment of the Weekend
I finally did the December issue of the Blender of Love. I made the little cartoon below but I'm not sure if it's clear that the tree itself is made of inverted hearts.
Poem of the Moment

been down these roads
a long while now
saw a lot of friendly faces
working it all out

too many times
i've been finding easy gravy trains
making those gravy train angels
sweeping our arms
facing the sky
laying down by the side of the trail

A rough recreation of a "Paul Simon lyric" I read in a dream last night. The most memorable part was the idea of making "snow angels" in gravy, and how that plus the "gravy train" was a metaphor for taking romance too casually, and too much for granted.

It seemed a lot more meaningful in the dream.

Links Etc. of the Moment
Bill the Splut has had some interesting links not too long ago... Baby Bush Toys was worth a grin...I especially like the simplifed Rubic's Cube (aka "Twisty Thing, That is Red") on their Products Page.

But even better was the page on a new scientific theory, Incompetent Design...basically, there are too many kludges and misjudgments in the construction of our bodies to really accept a theory of intelligent design...so the designer must be rather bumbling. Or as a new song puts it (sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":)

My bones proclaim a story of incompetent design.
My back still hurts, my sinus clogs, my teeth just won't align.
If I had drawn the blueprint, I would cer-tain-ly resign.
Incompetent Design!

Heh heh. Hello Captain Appendix!

In related news, it looks like it might have been a single small genetic mutation 20K-50K years ago that essentially "caused" white people.

There are ways this kind of finding can be misused...I'm sure some racist is going to propose a gentic test to determine if someone is white or black "for real". (And given the broad pallette of complexions I've seen, it seem kind of weird to think it could ever be considered a "boolean" thing.)

Random Quote of the Moment

Come on, Hitler, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade.

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Sick Sad World of the Moment

The U.S. state of Missouri has warned authorities to be on the alert after a fetus was cut from the womb of a homicide victim in the town of Skidmore, the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department has said.

Ugh. The article makes it sound like a kind of bizarre homebrew Caesarean Section/homicide. Also there was some local coverage including the sheriff's quote "Someone was wanting a baby awful bad."

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Ponder of the Moment
What makes a website look professional? I realize that there is a certain corporate "look" that tends to express "this is a serious organization" and I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

For example, I'm working with a friend of Ksenia's who runs an interesting balloon artwork company (and btw...trying to find a way of explaining what that is, as opposed to little twisty balloon animals, is a tremendous challenge.) He's not crazy about his site, it's not bad but it looks a little amateurish, and not very corporate. In contrast, he had us click over to this site, commissioned by a woman he knows. Now that site isn't perfect, but I know what he means...it seems "professional". It's frustrating for me, because I know this professionalism when I see it, but have a hard time knowing exactly what "it" is. Some ideas:

• Use of space...often this means using a fixed-width table and really filling the space well.
• Use of frames and boxes...amateurish sites tend to just have text flowing everywhere. Lots of professional sites use sub-boxes to modularize the page, often with little rounded-corner or triangularized title bars.
• Use of sans-serif fonts -- a little detail, but I think many amateur sites just let the default "Times New Roman" remain, and that seperates the sheep from the goats.

My own sites are pretty hit or miss. The old Love Blender Digest design wasn't bad for its 1998 heritage, but violated the first rule. The current layout, designed with help from Lupschada, isn't quite "fixed width" but makes better use of the space, and follows the second principle of boxes and the third principle of a sans-serif font. This site follows all three principles to some extent, except for the main text. Ksenia thinks the soon-to-be-retired Alien Bill frontpage is some nice design work, but it's more artsy-fartsy than professional. (Heh, come to think of it, it follows all 3 principles pretty well, but I think its use of color and big images takes it out of the "serious site" column.)

Any thoughts or other ideas about gimmicks are appreciated. (heh, like judicious use of happy smiling corporate people clip art photos...) I have a sneaking suspicion that while great as opposed to good web design might be a better of training and highly polished aesthetic sense, the difference between good and bad is more one of a small bag of tricks...

Heh...I was happy to see the rambling discussion on hacker "L33T"-speak yesterday generating almost as any comments as the Israeli/American policy discussion two days before that.

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Quote of the Moment

Face it, you either need a job, an organized religion, or a vice in order to meet people or keep busy.

We were wondering about how idle we would be, were we members of the idle rich.

Image and Link and Toy of the Moment
--Some researches have assembled an alphabet made from snapshots of brainfolds...the page includes a fun drag-and-drop toy for spelling out your own words.

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Links of the Moment
The Onion's AV Club has some great retrospectives at the end of every year: here's the least essential albums of 2003 and the annual cheap toy roundup. That makes for some good readin'. Hmm, I wonder if North Korea's nuclear technology is on par with their web design? It's odd seeing old school communism piped through a newer technology like the web...actually, it's just odd seeing this kind of propaganda. (Our propaganada is much slicker and shinier! Sometimes you hardly realize it's there at all.)

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Essays of the Moment
Brilliant essay by David Brin on Lord of the Rings and its retrograde view of technology and democracy, with further thoughts on how we judge who is good and who is evil. He also wrote on the democracy of Star Trek vs. the elitism of Star Wars. Reminds of some of the other Star Wars and Trek stuff I posted this summer. I think I need to hunt down some of Brin's scifi.

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Irony of the Moment

When I came to office, I made a commitment to transform America's national security strategy and defense capabilities to meet the threats of the 21st century.

The trouble is, that's the threat of the 20th Century, not the 21st!! It's not going to do us a heck of a lot of good against smuggled bombs and viruses, is it? But it will put a lot of money into the hands of defense contractors, and away from the people who might be doing something useful, like scanning incoming cargo shipments. Yeesh. AIM of the Moment

ranjit: Some people can say "you know what I'm saying" in just two syllables, nome sane?
kirk: we laugh because it's funny, we laugh because it's true
ranjit: we laugh because of the electrodes inserted into our cerebellums

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Link of the Moment
The results of the Great Bellybutton Lint Survey are in. And the conclusion is, that ain't just clothing lint. I object to their use of the term "Snail Trail" for the hair trailing from the belly button on down...that implies that it's slimy or slippery, and hopefully it's neither of these things. "Happy Trail" is a much better term.

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Quote of the Moment

Not all of us who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

Not as bad a movie as I had feared, but I don't see why people praise it quite so much as they do.