Opinion/Editorial/Life

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.19.2023 to 11.25.2023)

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Oh look, I fell into the “Trap of Not”. I am pretty sure I mentioned it before. It’s just a little phrase I think about sometimes when I want to do something but I just, do not. Specifically, in this case, writing and blogging. Like these little Saturday write-ups, I wanted to at least keep up with them, but I ended up, well, not. I also feel stupid jealous of people who blog and write regularly right now.

Look at Cynni’s Blog here, she writes daily. Long detailed posts, daily, with her dog and her little neat cartoon images spiced in. I’m jealous of that. My excuse is often that I don’t have the time, but the reality is, I kind of DO have the time. I just keep falling into Not. Another one that I’d love to be more like with Lameazoid is The Figure in Question. Not so much daily reviews, just more a long daily catalog of “here is this figure and this is why I like it.”

A while back I picked up this massive ball of blogs from a Hacker News posts. I’m still, still going through them, months later. There are so many that seem to have died for one reason or another. I mean, writing regularly, or even semi-regularly I suppose, is not for everyone. The process of going through them is slow, but there has been a fun accidental mechanism in my RSS reader that has helped. Basically, the feeds never update all at once. I get maybe 10-15 new ones showing up daily, but I think it’s timing out otherwise. So I skim through the ones that do show up and see if any of them are interesting, if not, I dump them. If they are interesting I throw them in a new category to better look at later, or if they have an obvious theme, I categorize them accordingly, since it’s Hacker News, it’s MOSTLY “Personal Blogs – Tech Enthusiasts”.

It’s also weird how some of these people organize their blog titles. Some people give useful information, and some just have these weird one-word titles that feel completely meaningless. Some of these blogs seemed completely themed around some extremely obscure tech topic (I usually drop these). You can tell when someone started a blog because they picked up some goofy random new coding language. Most of these I find, are also dead blogs. I guess they got tired of the topic or didn’t find an audience or something.

I always tell myself I don’t care about having an audience, and I keep plugging away at it anyway. For decades now. It’s a little crazy maybe. And I just write whatever comes to mind. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two, having eaten my breakfast, done some daily quests in Sky, and browsed my RSS reader. Everyone else in the house is still asleep except the cats, so it’s nice and quiet. Anyway, I tell myself I don’t care about an audience, but also I don’t understand why everything seems to go nowhere.

Which brings up some of my activities this week. Working a bit to better understand the whole Search Engine Search Console thing. I set up a plug-in to give both blogs a mobile theme because I know Google complains about that. It’s boring and ugly, it gets the job done, I guess. I also have no idea why some of the issues listed are simply, “Page discovered but not indexed”. Like, ok, that’s on you, why are you not indexing them? No other explanations were given. I’ve also found it wants to index pages for individual images and such.

Which is another thing I should do. I need to flip through the gallery adding alt text to images. For accessibility. I am all for accessibility, but honestly, most of the images, don’t super matter or are meaningless if you can’t see them. Sorry people with bad or no sight, it sucks I am sure, but me describing a random concert photo, is not going to help you get the feeling of the photo. Most other images amount to something basic, “Python Logo”, “XXXXX Album cover.” You are not missing anything not seeing it. I think there is actually a way to get screen readers to ignore those images. A picture is worth a thousand words, and those thousand words already exist in the Blog Post the picture is in. There is one blog I read in my RSS reader with a dude who is absolutely obsessed with alt text. Like, it’s literally probably something he should see a shrink or something over because when I write obsessed, I mean OBSESSED. If I were a person who needed alt texts, I would be upset with how wordy and insanely long this dude makes his alt texts.

Other fun this week, it is, of course, Thanksgiving. We went to my parent’s house and had a very basic turkey, potatoes, corn, and green beans, style Thanksgiving dinner. My brother and his family were busy. It was enjoyable.

Side note, I typo-ed the word green. Are you OK there Spell Check? The obvious word is not there at all.

I’ve decided to dump the whole “What I Got” part of these. I might do the toys and games stuff on Lameazoid if I ever started regularly posting there again, but I did want to throw in that I bought some more memory for my gaming PC. It came with 16GB, which is decent, but I’ve been doing some AI stuff and I may move my Video Editing to that PC from my old PC, so I added another 32GB of RAM. Total of 48 now, which is probably a bit excessive. Nothing fancy, I was looking at fancy but realized that it wouldn’t do any good because it’s just going to clock down to match the speeds of the current 16GB, which was plenty fast enough already.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

A Place for Wordles

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If you are following this blog with RSS, you may have noticed some Wordles and other similar content showing up. I’ve excluded that again for now. I’ve been working on a sort of mini project I’ve wanted to set up for a while, and I even considered trying to write my own plug-in to do it, but it turns out there already is one.

Basically, Micro-Blog style posts, within this larger blog. In the past, this is the sort of thing I would have spun up an entire second WordPress Instance for, and then quickly forgotten about it after ten posts, and then folded it into the main blog, maybe. Ever since Twitter died, I have not really had a place for these sorts of posts, and frankly, I also never really cared to post them to places like Twitter anyway. Things like Wordle scores, the little image banners Duolingo spits out, a random Youtube Video with maybe some notes, or song lyrics, etc. I also have some random pictures of food that I’ve stuck in the Microblog section.

Basically, stuff I kind of want to keep a record of, but that doesn’t need a whole post or fanfare and that frankly, no one else probably cares about. It’s all there on that page linked above. I’m still messing with the formatting a bit.

What I’m using is a “secret backend page” with a plug-in called User Submitted Posts. It’s intended to let users submit posts easily to the blog, but as no one else should be able to register to post, and I’ve set the settings limited to admins, and the page is “secret”, I am the only one submitting. I also streamlined down all the settings. Everything goes into the Microposts category, and it only has boxes for a title, tags, post content, and uploads, all optional. It’s about as close to making a Microblog clone with WordPress as I can get. I’ve also verified that users not logged in can’t see or get to the posting page.

It’s also simple enough to set up a shortcut to the posting page on the home screen of my phone. In the pasty, I had tried using the WordPress App, but it’s just not suitable for quick posting of this style. You have to select tags and categories and go through menus, it’s just clunky for this purpose.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (08.27.2023 to 09.02.2023)

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Another slowish week, aren’t they all kind of that way. I’ve been filling a lot of my time with learning again, on two paths. The first is the fairly newishly released Foundational C# with Microsoft Learn on FreeCodeCamp. It all feels very familiar as I know some C/C++ and some Python and some Javascript now. The real issue there is I am constantly forgetting things like semicolons. Also, Arrays feel really screwy in C# for some reason. Variables in general I suppose, because I’m not used to explicitly typing variables.

I’m going to finish it, but I am a bit let down because the course is all, “Build something to work in the Command Line”. Which is cute, but I really want to get more into building things with GUIs and things that aren’t just cute automation scripts.

Which sort of touches on the other learning I’ve been doing, which is explicitly graphical, because I have been learning GODOT, the game-making engine. I’ve only done one course, but I picked up the recent Humble Bundle package. It’s a rerun of Zenva courses, and I thought I had picked it up previously. With the whole current Unity controversy, it’s come back for an encore. I rather like it so far, granted so far it’s been a crash course of the basics and then build simple little coin-collecting game.

I did already modify the tutorial code a bit because I didn’t like that the character could leave the screen. I may mess with it a bit more. I kind of want to build Pong, again, with it. Pong has sort of become my own personal “Hello World” of game-building projects in different types of code. So far I’ve done it in Python using Turtle, and C for the Arduboy. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about if it could be done using CSS and HTML since CSS can handle some variables and do dynamic actions. I’ve also been thinking of how to make it using prims and scripts in Second Life.

Back to GODOT, it has some advantages because the scripting is similar to Python, which I am most familiar with. The courses are all fairly quick too, which is nice. It seems kind of corny, but I do really get a kick out of these basic simple games on these various platforms. I think it’s just the whole “I made this”. Even when it’s like 90% some tutorial, it’s still neat because, “I made this, I put this together and now when I press the WASD or Arrows (another mod I added), the little character moves and collects the little coins.”

God knows if I’d ever actually produce anything to “release” but I’ve always loved the idea of making a game sometime. I used to draw out elaborate platformer levels based on other games in a sketchbook when I was younger.

The other real big event this week was my wife’s uneventful (her choice), 50th Birthday. We didn’t really do anything on the birthday itself, I went to the store, so exciting. There is a party the following weekend (today), but I’m not sure she is super excited for it.

Activity Log

I didn’t acquire anything really beyond the GODOT Humble Bundle. Oh right, I did pick up GI Joe Classified Shipwreck. Then I picked him up again, after returning the first one, because the hand broke off, with barely a touch, right out of the package. Lousy shoddy QC there Hasbro.

Live Shows Weekly Wrap Up

2023.09.24 – Weekly Wrap Up (09.17.2023 – 09.23.2023)

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I am bad at selfies.  I added one last week to these little journal posts and I wanted one for this week but they are kind of bad.  Or maybe I am just bad at looking excited.

Anyway, I’m not late, I am intentionally not on time, because I was busy yesterday.  I spent almost all day in Champaign (Urbana technically) at the Pygmalion event at the Rose Bowl Tavern.  I’m actually not sure if there is one of these or more of them per year, but it’s apparently the 19th year.  It’s a little craft vendor fair alongside a bunch of musical acts both indoor and outdoor.  I primarily went to see Lauren Mayberry’s first solo tour.  But I also like music, so I went early to see all of the outdoor shows.  There was swap flip-flopping between in and out on the schedule, I didn’t want to lose my spot up front, so I just stayed outside.  There were other Lauren/CHVRCHES fans there doing the same, which isn’t surprising.

Overall I saw 6 acts total, one of the scheduled outdoor acts, ggwendolyn, had to cancel.  This also meant the schedule got compacted up and while it was originally supposed to start at 1:45, things didn’t start until 2:45.  So I got there early, and then got to wait a bit longer than expected.  Not a huge deal.  I got to watch them doing the soundcheck, which, at least for me, was super interesting.  This guy, we’ll call him Bob, because that was his name, everyone on stage called him that, would go around checking mics and making sure things work then he’d head into the “crowd” and have band members do tests to balance things out.  Then they would all adjust their little personal directional speakers for levels on the various tracks (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) on a personalized basis.  All from a little portable wireless pad.  It was neat.

Also, I say “crowd” because at this stage of the day, there were, maybe 20-30 people mingling around the small parking lot area where the shows took place.    As the day went on, the bands became clearly more and more professional about how they operated, and basically just, produced better and better sound.  As as that progressed, the crowd size grew and grew.  It was fun to watch actually.  From fairly basic setups to more and more complex setups, from using the house speakers for the feedback audio to using in-ear headsets.  From just, checking the watch after every song to see how much time there was to play, to having a full-on set list, ready and set up and available.  From random comments about writing up songs because of “X”, to having full-on fun little stories.

Anyway, I saw, in order:

  • Emily the Band – She mentioned that she went to school at U of I in Champaign and had played at the Rose Bowl Tavern a few times, so they seem to more or less be a local band.  It was the first time they got to play on the main stage.    I enjoyed their set and they seemed like they were having a fun time all around.
  • Fiona Kimble – She was alright, though probably my least favorite of the day.  The easy comment here is, it felt like there were too many people on stage, but then she said the pianist had come in special and they did a couple of duet songs, so well, maybe it felt like too many people because they had a bonus person in their set.
  • Lutalo – I really enjoyed his set.  It was very low key, basically finger-picking folk music on an electric guitar.  Dude seemed to really get into his songs too.
  • Tim Atlas – Dude was really good, and they hit all the right notes of having a band that felt like they all were really having a good time while putting out some good, varied music.  The guitarist also had a talk box (think Peter Frampton, Do You Feel Like We Do), for one song, which was fun.
  • Claud – The only artist I managed to get around to listening to before the show, and it’s funny how much that changes one’s perception.  I also found that I really enjoyed Claud’s music, from my before the show listening, and I was already kind of a fan, because it’s enjoyable.  I don’t really know why but it kind of reminds me of sort of, toned down a bit King Princess.  Just the vocal styling, the lyrics, and all that.  I want to listen to more of the artists I saw but probably Claud most of all.
  • Lauren Mayberry – Ok, Claud most of all, behind the obvious.  I tried to mostly avoid watching other people’s videos of Lauren’s solo tour, so I could mostly go into this show blind.  I had already listened to the one single, *Are You Awake*, and I had listened to *Crocodile Tears* beforehand.  It was all great, and definitely a good different feel from Chvrches.  Kind of reminds me a bit of Wolf Alice maybe.  Probably my favorite was the final track, *Sorry Etc*, which is one extreme end of the styling and very very “screamo punk rock” style.  The other end probably being *Are You Awake*.  Also, probably just because of where I ended up standing up front on the end of the stage when she came to my side of the stage, she seemed to be “angry face screaming” a few times like right at me.  

    Please don’t want to kill me Lauren, I’m sorry, etc.

Anyway, I’ll probably make a gallery of my photos at some point, though they aren’t real amazing, my phone’s camera isn’t super great.  I had asked them about bringing my proper camera and it was in the car but I decided it was too much of a hassle.  

I did have a fun good sign moment before the show.  I had stopped in a few stores over in Champaign before the show, and when I walked into Five Below, there was a familiar voice on the radio, with the CHVRCHES/Marshmallow collab track Here With Me.  It took me a minute to place the song because I don’t really listen to it, basically ever.  I keep forgetting it exists, which is funny because in some ways it may be the most popular CHVRCHES track due to the Marshmello exposure.

The rest of the week was relatively uneventful aside from Friday evening.  I went and met up with my parents and brother and a couple of my nieces and we went to watch the Route 66 Carshow parade in Springfield.  I didn’t end up taking any photos, but it was fun.  Basically, a lot of the classic cars that are in the show itself all just, drive to downtown.  They go a pretty good distance, as they start down near Dirksen and Stevenson Drive and go downtown.  I realize this is meaningless to most people but this means they go 3 miles or so up Stevenson and then 3 miles or so up 6th Street to downtown Springfield.  It’s a good distance on some main throughways in the city, especially for a bunch of classic show cars.  Also, there is a police presence, but they also don’t block the roads, so there are just, regular cars driving around them.

I’m sure I’ll write up on it eventually, but I also kind of spur of the moment updated my PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It’s mostly the same honestly. I hate how I can’t dock the taskbar to the side though and I immediately changed is the centering on it though because the centered icons is functionally garbage and it’s ugly as shit. I also found a cheap price to update it to the Pro version from Windows Home. There are a few virtualization things that are only in Pro, but also only Pro allows for Remote Desktop access. It’s actually something I have been wanting to do even in Windows 10, for the same reasons. Also, in theory, I think Pro has fewer ads stuck in it, because well, you’re paying for it.

On Friday before going to Springfield I had the day off so we also put out the fall decorations around the outside of the house, though they aren’t completely finished. Also a few indoor ones but my wife does all that, I just haul totes around for that.

Activity Log

I’m not going to go into it all, but one of the stores I went to was Ollie’s.  Which I’ve been to elsewhere years ago when traveling, but this one opened up recently, closer to where I live.  It’s basically a closeout store, lots of stuff for like, 75% less than what it would have been originally.  They had a ton of Marvel Legends I didn’t care much about, and a few Star Wars Black Series I didn’t care about.  What I did pick up was a pile of Fortnite stuff.  Also, they had a bunch of Eternals Marvel Legends, which I have most of from previous markdowns, but I picked up Ajak, which was the only one I didn’t have.  I kind of really like the design of the Eternals, but I they are also all very samey looking, with almost no accessories, which made the figures a huge turn-off at the standard ML pricing.  I’ve managed to collect them all at like half price or below, which is just fine for me.

Not much else otherwise this week.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap-Up (9.10.2023 – 09.16.2023)

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Part of the pain of these posts is, I don’t really keep a log, so I have to go back and remember what I did the last week.

Part of the point of these posts, is I don’t keep a log, and I have to go back and remember what I did during the last week.

It’s all a sort of, purposeful, mental health exercise. Try to reflect on life and the good or whatever I suppose. Some weeks are in fact, truly uneventful and boring. Which in theory should be the time to spur some sort of reflection and appreciation of “the little moments”. I guess. I have a vaguely passing interest in the whole Zen mindset like that, or whatever it would be, but I also am generally pretty negative in mood lately, so it’s hard to really give a shit.

See, this is me, trying to free-flow write while I remember what I should write. I used to be pretty good at this. I really need to start doing it MORE I think. For some weird reason I often get caught up in this weird, bland, technical style of writing, where in the end, I certainly did not write about myself or my thoughts, but what I think some hypothetical, reader might give a shit about. This becomes a problem because, especially when I’m feeling pretty down, which is basically always, that “hypothetical reader” is someone who will never give a shit about anything I write because why would they.

I have this half-finished post in my “WIP” folder about how I burned myself out on coding. I guess I can dump that one because I am feeling it come back a bit again. I’ve been doing some more online tutorials. This week, I wrapped up one I started a bit ago on Responsive Web Design. I’m also working through the JavaScript course on FCC, which was why I did the Web Design one. And I’ve started doing one on C#. Why C#? I dunno, I do know some C and C++, this is just the evolution of that I suppose. I have dreams of one day actually making proper GUI-style apps, even for simple things. I need to learn JavaScript for work. Well, I don’t NEED to, I WANT to. My job requires no coding skills, but the side projects I do at work for the group, to help keep myself valuable as an employee, do need coding.

And I feel like I am pretty good at coding. I mean, next to a lot of folks, I am absolutely awful, but I like to think I am pretty good.

I should stick a meme in here, I keep meaning to use more memes to inspire more self-reflective posts.

Anyway, the “Activity Log” is a bit lengthy this week, so I’ll move on to that.

Activity Log

This really does occur in waves, it’s funny. Also, I mentioned last week, for a variety of reasons, I’ve basically gotten some bonus money through work, so I’ve been doing a bit of catch-up. Plus I had some pre-order stuff come in (one has not arrived yet). I actually thought I had more but I put the Humble Bundles on last week’s list. I also renewed several domain names and paid for my web hosting for the rest of the year (and then some).

Music

Just one this week, my pre-order of the Tron Legacy 10th anniversary vinyl came in. It’s very nice, I love the way the arcade cabinet slipcover works with the inner cover, but with the slipcover on, it makes it too thick to fit in the grooves on my Vinyl shelf. I wonder if I could carefully chisel a slightly wider slot without taking the whole thing down. Also the second record is orange colored. There are two records and they match the colors of the Tron world. I’ll eventually do a Friday Album post on this album, I am sure.

Books

One I forgot last week, Corey Doctorow’s The Internet Con Kickstarter. I have not read it yet, and I’m not real sure why I went in on this Kickstarter because I honestly find Doctorow to be a bit insufferable at times, though he also makes some good points at other times. There isn’t a lot of in-between on it. I am blaming peer pressure.

And then there are the usual, random Kindle Deal pick-ups.

It’s also worth mentioning that we also subscribed to Kindle Unlimited. I’m not sure if we’ll keep it long term, but for at least two months we have it. My wife has been talking about getting ads for books she wants to read but they are all Kindle Unlimited, I told her to just subscribe if she wants it. Especially with the small pay bump. She’s kind of bad about never wanting to do things like this that she wants.

Toys and Stuff

A while back I picked up a few Dungeons and Dragons figures on clearance from Amazon. I want to finish the set, but I’m waiting for another markdown. Except in the case of the two-pack for Venger and the Dungeon Master. It was marked down, but also, more importantly, it was I think the first release for the set, and I am worried it will eventually sell out on my. So I went ahead and picked it up. It’s a nice-looking set, I feel like it’s not worth “the price of two figures”. The Dungeon Master is small, and essentially a lumpy statue. Venger is quite large, but he is also, effectively a statue, because his neck joint is useless, and his legs, while articulated, are enclosed in a long plastic skirt.

(This is a stock image)

I also got this neat Recycling truck on super clearance. I pick up these sorts of things because they make good props for photos (that I never actually take). It’s a bit small for 6″ figures, but it’ll work.

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