just enough time to be preoccupied

openclaw

2026-02-16T12:54:22Z

I've been playing with this thing lately. (more detail here) tl;dr version, it's a local agent that runs on top of the LLM of your choice that can access the host machine and also acts as something of an MCP. (thing that allows the agent to interact with other systems.. I think it's easier to think of it as a generic API interface) It does a lot of automation stuff too, but it's really all just cron jobs.

Anyway, I haven't really found anything useful to do with it yet other than check auction sites and for-sale forums for things I want to buy. It's been interesting as a sysadmin buddy. I don't know that it's terribly good at it, but it has the "confidence" to just do stuff that I might not these days. (though this reminds me of being a teen in the era of windows 3.1 with no internet; just doing stuff to the OS was the only thing there was to do) I've built it up to be able to build me a precis on whatever topic, and that's kind of useful. I mostly interact with it through the telegram messaging platform, so I can get this stuff away from home. It can run stable-diffusion for image generation, but I have yet to make that work reasonably, or to even find a real use for it.

I've also been using it to manage how I do RAG (Retrieval-augmented generation) where the material it's scanning is all on the local box.

I think the biggest, and on-going disappointment is that I can't reliably get it to go scrape a website; something that's been automatable since the 90's. It's really attached to one solution that I can't get to work. It can try to access http headless, but that usually gets shut down. Typically, you can give such things a different browser signature, but it can't do that. It also is stuck on a lot of ethics and safety rules that may or may not actually apply. I thought this was a ghost of the host LLM, but even if I run a less commercial one locally, it complains, so it must be in openclaw itself. (if it's worth noting, one thing I was trying to do was scrape certain websites around UX career things and have it ingest it all for a UX thought partner agent. It'll do it if I manually collect the stuff, but that's half the effort.

I find myself trying to figure out a way that I could run a business off of this.. afterall, that's the narrative driving the hypecycle on this thing. But it's the same problem I have without being ai-augmented, what's the business?

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not a real update but..

2024-09-16T14:09:08Z

I really like this song. It's been stuck in my head the last couple of weeks.
I don't know a lot about his band, but I think this is the 3rd track that's been getting rotation on the stations I listen to. Weirdly, once I looked them up and saw them, I was a little put off. (especially from some of the KEXP live performances I saw) They come off as somewhere between cocky jerks (oasis style, maybe?) and 90's throwback in some kind of bad way.. Still, for reasons, this song hits some resonant things in my brain.

Also, interesting to me, the first lyric "Did you know I could claim the dreamer from the dream" is a line used in addiction therapy/support. It's from a book called A Course in Miracles that the author claims was dictated to her by Jesus. I guess I'm always a sucker for stories of divine hallucinations.. Makes me wonder what's going on with that developer who wrote an API to God. Maybe he died? I can't remember.

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computers are confusing [now]

2024-07-02T14:08:31Z

Over the weekend I had this task of wanting to do a deep virus scan on my PC because it's been acting weird. (which in retrospect, I think is because my ATA drives spin down after an hour of inactivity no matter what settings I change)

Anyway, this turned out to be quite a challenge.

Just like trying to do things in python, instructions that exist are always wrong or don't apply to what you have. making a PC boot disk on a mac, that actually worked, was tough. and then it turned out that the boot disk didn't have drivers for my video card so it didn't work. etc etc.

Anyway. I finally got it done. It took 3 days. haha. But I'm posting to celebrate that. I got through the frustration wall and got it done. No serious virii. It's funny that I feel like I used to be a lot better at this stuff.. hardware, sysadmin stuff, etc. I feel like it's more challenging now than it used to be, but maybe it's some combination of having been out of the loop for so long, and getting frustrated faster.

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dreamlog: giant pool cue class?

2024-06-11T14:02:24Z

I think there was something that I now forget about playing pool... but where coherent memory starts, I was in this strange, long but small side room of a Instagram influencer looking apartment and this lady was coarsely chopping bits out of the end of a gigantic pool cue. ..supposedly to illustrate the special construction of this thing, invented by the lady who manufactured them. Something about the wood being solid, but it was like several solid chunks arranged in a certain way, kind of like staves. There was no mention of the gigantic-ness, though I feel it was understood that it was just large for purposes of explaining the construction.

( Read more... )

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dreamlog - a tiger?

2024-05-30T21:35:18Z

I had a dream this morning, I think after I woke up and ripped the CPAP off and then went back to sleep. There was more of the front half of the dream that I don't remember, but I was at my drum lesson place, doing my lesson with the guy, and he was like, "oh yeah" and opened a door and a really friendly giant cat, like a tiger or something came out and was trying to love on everybody. (I think there was a third person there suddenly? maybe the tiger's keeper?)

That's it.

I was trying to figure out what it meant. The instructor has been more relatable at times, maybe the cat was a representation of him being more personable?

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on eating at home

2024-05-25T21:18:06Z

I am generally kind of adverse to eating at home. I was just pondering this.. I want to make some black bean dip, which is super simple, but also something I haven't done in a long time, and I think both the uncertainty of the recipe's success as well as a generally uncertain time to prepare (even though it's just like dumping some cumin in a can of beans) kind of puts me off.

I will cook hot dogs, or a piece of salmon at home sometimes, but these are very known timeframes and outcomes.

Also thinking I would rather try to make a recipe not when I am at the point of meal time. if it fails, I'm going to be left hungry. (or unsatisfied?) But also, I am less likely to eat "leftovers," if I were to make it at a non-meal time. I think part of this is that when I'm freesytling a schedule, I don't know I need to eat until I -need- to eat.

I don't know if this is really a thing, but it seems like a viable part of it. There's probably something here about novelty too.

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RIP Steve Albini

2024-05-09T12:49:47Z

The Chicago recording engineer, Steve Albini, passed away yesterday.

It was, maybe surprisingly, impactful to me when I heard.

He was only 62. It seemed so out of left field.

I never met him, but read a lot of his writing/thoughts growing up, and it was all pretty influential to me, in terms of audio engineering, but maybe more broadly in terms of philosophy and attitude. A little dissonance here because adopting some of that without having the skills that he did has likely been among my many dysfunctions, (see all my "why am I uncomfortable playing in a cover band" rambles) but still, that stuff is a part of me, and I think that accounts for something.

I guess he just seemed like a constant in the universe. Always a touchstone for some philosophical line(s) of thought in recording. Always a possibility of going and recording with him, or at least at his studio, in the back of my mind because affordability and reasonableness in business practices were a part of his thing. Michael and I had just talked about this possibility in the last few months. ..probably unrealistically, but it's the kind of thing that just lives in your head as an option.

Anyway, RIP to him, and how cool to have left such a big mark on the world.

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another dream log, this time including Jean Claude VanDamme

2023-10-20T15:13:16Z

I don't know what's up with all the remember-able dreams lately. Two theories are that I'm sleeping well, and that I'm waking up during REM sleep.

Either way, I had a dream last night.. there was a beginning that I don't remember, but I was with a group of people and as I start remembering, we were walking back from somewhere, through a gym equipment store owned by Jean Claude VanDamme. As we pass through and he's standing there in a retail dude kind of way, I notice that one of his machines has kind of fallen apart. I don't know what the machine was, but the broken part looked like some kind of bike handlebar and all the bolts had fallen out of it, and there was a hack-job metal strap loosely holding it on.

I said something about it, and started fixing it. We were having some kind of conversation while I worked on it, and then he pointed out some other bad assembly, so we were both kneeling on the floor trying to put this thing back together. it was a round sheet of plastic with some kind of plastic ring/gasket around the outer edge, and thick white grease all over one side. The plastic ring kept separating from the sheet, and we were trying to get it back on so the whole thing could be put back onto the machine.

That's about all I remember.

I'm pretty sure this one came from a few things.. I think the forgotten beginning came from watching Goosebumps. The gym equipment was from trying to find an affordable but not junk incline bench yesterday. (no joy) And the Jean Claude thing was from my childhood friend _________ who I don't talk to much, but occasionally sends me completely random things on instagram - last night he sent an old conan clip where Jean Claude was demonstrating kicking a mug of water out of andy's hand.

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dreamlog - lizards

2022-11-03T11:33:14Z

I think this is a recurring dream that I've only just now remembered...

my family is all out to eat. we haven't done this since 2020 due to covid.

Dad keeps getting bitten by these small lizards that are in the collar of his shirt. we catch one, and another appears. At one point I flick one with my fingers and it disappears in a puff of scales.

after dinner, dad takes a microwave out to his car that mom brought for him.

I think the lizard thing is just worrying about his health. My last grandparent, his mom, just got covid in the nursing home, and he was exposed. he was also having some lower GI problems that continue to be undiagnosed.

I think the microwave was just from the personal property inventory-ing hell I've been going through with insurance. had to spec appliances last night.

still.. weird dream. I have a troubled feeling today.

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dreamlog

2022-02-20T16:48:24Z

I haven't been having dreams I can remember for a while. This weekend is really the first time I've gone alarmclock-less in a while, and I think it contributed to some dreams.

Friday night I feel like I had about 5 different dreams, but I lost what most of them were about.

The first one I remember was that I was at a bar or restaurant somewhere where S, a friend/romantic interest from Lafayette times worked. I was hanging out with her, but something was happening with cars in the parking lot so I went out, apparently had somekind of super powers, and picked up the entire parking lot by the concrete curb around it and moved it somewhere. Then the dream shifted, and I heard a sound that I knew was this other superhero person looking for me. like with a metaldetector-esque device. He was looking for me, because whatever had given me super powers was an item I had and he wanted it. by using it, it set off the detector. He was tall and lanky in "angel" looking garb. When I saw him pop around the corner of a building I took off flying, knowing that he was more powerful and faster than me. and he took off after me. That's all I remember.

I think this was largely inspired by my recent binge watching of the HBO series "raised by wolves," a ridley scott produced sci-fi bit that is suspected to be based on the apocyphral book of enoch. It's really bad in some ways, but really tickles my brain in some ways. Maybe I thought I was a necromancer in the context of that show?

The other dream is that I was hanging out with T, another from-lafayette person who happens to live a few blocks from me here. We're not really friends but acquainted. In the dream, he owned a bar/restaurant of sometype. (don't know what's up with this concept recurring) It served some sort of fruit drink in weird bottles that reminded me of the pepsi bottles from back to the future 2. We were embarking on some side business of making these clay sculptures that were to be used as headstones, and were setting them up in the landscaping outside the business. I think there was more, but I can't remember.

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rain rain.. (gutters and downspouts)

2021-03-11T13:56:21Z

I'm thinking about gutters and downspouts today. I think maybe this is the first real precipitation since the mega snow. and to be fair, it hasn't even started yet, but I can smell it. (and I saw it on the forecast) Supposed to go all day, and I guess that's what worries me - the reason the basement needed mold remediation and masonry work is because rain water isn't managed properly. I've been snoozing on it because bigger fish to fry, and also, I think it just seemed like rain was far away.. but here we are.

I think the fast solution will be to get those vinyl bag looking extensions that zip tie to the downspouts. Ultimately, I'm kicking around the idea of trenching and installing underground PVC extensions with a cleanout at the top. Not super pretty, but way functional. My front yard terminates in a 6" high retaining wall at the sidewalk, and I guess I'll have to knock out a chunk of that and have it re poured to facilitate the drains. I'll also, in some cases have to move the concrete tiles that are out there for this reason, but angled the wrong way. sounds like a few weekends of work.

The back yard is a little different, because I think the yard slopes toward the house, and the alley is pretty much "unimproved" as they say. So there's nowhere for water to go but back towards the house. I'm kicking around the idea of rain barrels. A barrel would definitely be good for the one on the back of the house, but there's another that's right in the middle of the house, but behind my midpoint fence, and on a very narrow walkway. hmm. But then there's also the sump pump drain, which is on my list. it sticks out from the foundation about 6 inches, so when it runs, it all just comes right back through the foundation. Need to send it somewhere, and I wouldn't want that stuff going into the rain barrel. Maybe I extend the underground drain from the front?

Another piece of all this is the gutters themselves. Mine seem to be ok, but there is exactly 1 tree in the entire neighborhood, and it's in my yard. It's a big one too.. so my gutters are full of leaves and sticks. Costco has some things you can put over the gutters and I'm thinking of doing that. I'm not super confident it will do the job, but worth a try.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about today.

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Memoir - 1995 - nanner niller

2020-12-12T17:58:52Z

In highschool, a couple of people in my little peer group worked at the Dairy Queen down the street from the highschool. _____ who was the singer in one of my bands as well as ____ who dated a guy who played bass in one of my bands.. (I think.. or did he date her older sister?) Also, now that I think of it, I believe _____ also worked there, someone who was only socially tangential, and is now an occasional riding buddy.

We were one of the rare schools in the state at the time that had "off campus lunch", and the DQ was a common stop. it wasn't a brazier location, so your options were basically chili cheese dogs or nachos. but that sufficed.

There was a secret menu item, invented by _____, a guy who was a few years older than me, but also was into BMX and worked there. It was called the Nanner Niller, and it was a coke with banana and vanilla flavoring. A tribute to Elvis Presley, somehow spawning from his peanut butter and nanner sandwiches. It's a great drink, and I still occasionally try to order it. many places, including my local DQ don't have any liquid banana (fake, or the dregs from the peeled banana bin) so it's rare that I actually get it.

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RBG

2020-09-19T02:17:44Z

I almost forgot. RBG passing. What a gut punch. When I got home Helena told me. I started to say "aww, that's too bad," but mid sentence it really hit me what that meant and my sentence turned into "ahh, we're fucked."

I'm glad for her time, and she did a badassed job for hanging around as long as she did. God help us all.

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sore butt

2020-09-02T03:01:56Z

I've been trying to ride _almost_ every day. Partially to try and lose weight, as the bare minimum thing I might accomplish in this tremendous downtime. (especially opportune when combined with the fact that I'm still not drinking soda because of the migraines.. probably down 600 calories a day right there) It's also become really the only activity in my life besides biological functions and staring at this screen.

Anyway, It's roughing me up. I have a saddle sore-junior, mostly from riding my cyclocross bike on trails, and my nipples are again chafed to bleeding, which is mostly due to the fact that all of my jerseys are old - I think the bike clothes companies make the fabric turn to steel wool after a year or two so you buy more new ones.

Last week I got 5 days and 80 some miles in. This week I've almost got 50 already. I seem to be losing about 6 lbs of water per ride (it's really humid here right now) but I'm not losing much other weight. At the same time, I can see more musculature and vasculature in my extremities, so I know at least a little fat is burning off. probably gaining muscle back is offsetting the loss.

The cross bike has been a good change of pace. I ride mostly the same trail over and over, and while it is the closest thing I've ever had to mastery, I'm really at the long tail of not getting much faster or doing anything new when using a mountain bike. I haven't used the cross bike on trails in about 2 years, after I fell and damaged my thumb. I started again last week, and it kind of re-opens the mastery conversation by being different enough that I'm back down the learning curve, but same enough that I'm having fun and not getting frustrated.

There are two difficult features on the trail. One is called "tetanus hill", and is basically a part of an abandoned car, an awkward chunk of concrete, and some wire fence sticking out the side of a levee. It's a steep climb with those obstacles, with not much run-up. The other is similar. Called "chunky monkey", it's a climb with little run-up, over a chunk of concrete and about 3 feet of big roots. These are the two things that I can't "clean" (traverse without stopping or putting a foot down) consistently on the cross bike. I have cleaned each of them at least once on it, but it's still iffy. Maybe that's exciting. I don't even think about them on the mountain bike. Along with this, I think falling the other day was good, because I haven't in a while. While it hasn't been the case in other areas of my life, I feel like falling reminds me that taking risks has rewards.. if I'm not falling, I'm not finding the edge of what I can do.

The cross bike has also reactivated something in my legs. I've had a couple of rides on it, where an hour in, I suddenly can just turn the crank over effortlessly. I don't know if it's muscle memory from when I used to ride it all the time, or if the biomechanics are better or what, but it's kind of nice.

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dream log

2020-08-20T22:06:58Z

I was just napping and had a dream that was the story of how the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger came up with all the songs for their second album. (honestly, I don't really like the stones, and I don't know what their second album was or that they had any problems writing it)

In the dream, they were a big hit with the first record, but were out of songs. They had an expensive studio, but weren't coming up with anything. Mick Jagger had gotten the record label to foot the bill for some hotel where he could go and write, but once there, he and the woman he was romancing mostly just hung out and did drugs. He and the woman had some kind of falling out, but she was still staying at the hotel, and he was trying to stay away most of the time. He ended up getting a job as something of a night watchman, and there were long sequences of him walking down alleys taking out the trash and taking keys that were hanging on all these weird outside, back-door key racks. I think there was a cat running around that he was friendly with.

At one point, in the trash, he finds a cardboard box with a bunch of leftovers of something that was a cross between vinyl siding and plastic comb binding, and this was going to be the way he wrote all the songs.. something about cutting them up into squares that would mark verses and choruses.. but that's where I woke up.

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mice

2020-08-15T17:59:32Z

we're having a mouse infestation. During the winter, we get some, understandably, as it's cold out and there's not much food. I'm not sure why they are coming in now.

One was in the kitchen (which must mean that my attempts to fill all the holes in the wall with steel wool failed) and Hank (cat) was chasing it around. Later that day, someone killed it and left it outside my office door where they bring the toy mice.

Yesterday I came home from a ride and there was a dead mouse in a 5 gallon bucket that Helena had left in the sink. It had cat food in it before, so the mouse must have been looking for food and jumped in from the washing machine? (how did it get on the washing machine???)

Today I asked Helena to bait a trap since we seem to be having so many.. In winter we just do two in the garage and get about a mouse every two weeks. An hour after she set it, it went off while she was out there dying yarn. I have the duty of disposing of them... so I went to get it, and I've not experienced such a fresh kill.. he was still twitching and his eyes were really bulged out. kind of grossed me out TBH. I hate having to kill them, but they poop all over our silverware if unchecked. ick.

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entertainment

2020-07-11T17:00:45Z

I've been playing a game called The Dream Machine lately. it's old, and puzzle-ish. I can't help but see it as something of practice for troubleshooting - there are clues, but the mechanics of unlocking puzzles generally gets down to a level of just having to exhaust all options. (and then think of more options) I've definitely had to search for help a few times, but I try to give each "stuck" situation a day of futzing with.

I've also been reading Seveneves. I think I'm on the 4th chapter? It's broken up oddly, so I'm not sure. The beginning has very much felt like Three Body Problem, I think mostly just because of the global level disaster component. [an aside, I was trying to find info on the three body problem movie, and apparently it was so bad that they just trashed the whole thing. a bummer.] I think the global disaster component makes me a little uncomfortable since we're in the time of covid, although it's a different kind of disaster all together. It's also space stuff set in very near future which I found a little jarring, having mostly been into farther out future space stuff the last several years. ..and in some way, "modern" space stuff is old to me. I guess we haven't made much progress in all that since I was a kid.. at least in the "manned" area of the field.

The main POV character still seems surprisingly undeveloped, but I guess when you've got a whole book to develop them, what's the rush. But I wonder if it's that she's on the Asperger spectrum, as the book alludes. There have been a couple of patches of excessively detailed description that have kind of glazed me over. Which is funny, because I can hang with all of Gibson's pants talk. I think it's a matter of finding the right level of detail and/or making you interested in the object of the explanation beforehand rather than after. There have been moments of people interaction that I tune out on and have to reread too.. writing style? my own broken attention? IDK. So far there has really been one very interesting scene with a bit of a rescue, and I'm hoping for more of that kind of urgency.

I also ran through a pile of those YA fantasy shows until I ran out. There hasn't been much else I've wanted to watch. I have done a few episodes of The Floor Is Lava, which I'm convinced is a covert Nike ad. Though, really, I think it was an attempt to generate something new that is social distance-able. (beyond the contestant groups, many of which are cohabitators) Agents of shield is the only thing left on a weekly release schedule.. and boy is it bad. but I'm invested.

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midnight diner

2020-06-14T22:26:54Z

I've been watching this show on netflix called midnight diner. It's pretty thin and soap-opera-ish, but the premise is really satisfying to me. It's a small Tokyo diner that's only open midnight to 7a, and seats about 9. One, slightly mysterious, good natured guy works there, and there is a rotating cast of regulars interspersed with randoms. Each episode is a story around one customer and is usually tied to the food they get at the restaurant. It's kind of like a short attention span Cheers with hyperbolicly emotional plots and just a dash of cooking show.

I'm into season 2 now. Glad I found it, nothing else is really capturing my interest. I wish there was a place like the diner here. In my 20's and even 30's hanging out at bars was a real community builder for me, and I always wish I could get that back. I've tried to find a "home" bar here, but everything has too many people, and I think I've just outgrown the bar vibe. The Diner in the show has alcohol and people drinking, but for the most part, the people seem like they are there mainly to hang out, which is what I'm really after.

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dream log

2020-06-10T17:05:49Z

I just remembered that I had a dream last night. I don't know if I was in a helicopter or looking at aerial footage, but I was scanning over a super dense urban area and there was some talk track about apartments. The apartment part was probably from looking at some urban planning graphics yesterday. It all looked like some of those old European cities where everything is just built on top of everything else.

Then I was in one of these sprawls. I went into a building and there was a young guy standing near a sink who said "just kick the crate to get it out". Then I was back outside near an old Blazer looking truck and another person was kicking an animal crate in it and a cat got out. I think it was pretty sickly looking at this point. I took the cat and went back towards the apartments. A Young girl opened a door and the cat ran in, but then something happened and I had the cat again.

The cat and I then went into another apartment that I guess was mine. I wanted to give it a bath. At this point the cat wasn't as sickly and it's fur was black and grey brindle-y. The apartment was pretty sqallor-y. There was what I thought was a place for food, but it turned into a giant overflowing pile of dirty litter. The cat got loose and ran into a bathroom, where it ran at Hank, one of our cats. At this point I noticed that the cat was huge. Hank is a pretty big Maine Coon and he was small in comparison to this cat. Then there was another overflowing pile of litter and the cat ran to it and started voraciously eating out of it. I grabbed him and pulled him away and that's where I woke up.

I think a lot of this has to do with our cat Howard barfing lately. Two times in the past week he has puked a massive amount of liquid. The most recent was last night and I spent about a half hour cleaning it up. I'm not sure whats up with him, but he seems alright otherwise so far.

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lyric generator

2020-04-23T15:50:16Z

I finally found a Fiverr dev willing to take on my little lyric generator project. It's been interesting playing product owner on a teeny tiny scale. His first pass only took him a couple of hours and was pretty cool, but it had a couple defects and one of the completion criteria was completely misinterpreted, but I figure in all, that's pretty good for the couple paragraphs and sharpie wireframes I gave him.
Here's an example of some of the things that come out based on a corpus of lyrics from the band hum:

my eye to see far to spare and she miss the train.
differ from her dream with absent eye.
upright let me to come back now.
do care what they choos.
dream with seven nine and think about the end.

I guess the biggest issue I have is that he used the NLTK routine for "stemming" the words, hence some of them missing their suffixes. If this were intended to be generating grammar from scratch, that would matter, but I'm just going off of probability, so it doesn't. He said he'll pull it out in the next rev, and I think the usefulness of output will go up a lot.

I only briefly looked over the code. It's not how I would have done it / want it to be in some ways, but I guess in terms of utility, it still gets me farther than I was. For example, he's just storing the words linearly in the order they are imported. I'm not sure how this affects the probability component since words have multiple instances. though maybe he's taking that into account when he retrieves the word rather than when he puts it in. It also looks like he's using a graph database for something? know they are trendy, but seems weird.. Maybe it's just easier to work with than other methods like my stupid hacky arrays.

The sentences don't make a lot of sense, but that is as expected. This concept is super basic, and the output intended to be more inspirational than usable verbatim. and hell, most song lyrics don't make a lot of sense anyway.

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last time..

2020-04-01T14:52:09Z

The "Last time I.." post is going around. Here's mine.

Last time I travelled abroad: This is tough.. either riding over the border to Tijuana or London for work. Either would have been sometime in 2015, I think. My international travel days are over. :/

Last time I slept in a hotel: September. I was in ATL for work. I had planned on booking a local airBnB to camp out and do some songwriting a couple weeks ago but then this all hit.

Last time I flew in an airplane: September - back from ATL

Last time I took a train: 2016 again - took the train up to LA, probably the last time was for the Core77 conference.

Last time I took public transit: I was riding the IndyGo redline a couple of times in November

Last time I had a house guest: I think maybe the last GenCon. Helena has relatives who stay with us.

Last time I got my hair cut: 2/15. It's getting bad.

Last time I went to the movies: 3/14. I probably shouldn't have, but I was kind of stir crazy, and I only do movies in the AM, so there were < 10 people there. it was bloodshot, which while not great, was at least entertaining.

Last time I went to the theatre: have I ever been to the theater?

Last time I went to a concert: I went to see Kat Edmonson at the Jazz Kitchen on 3/13

Last time I went to an art museum: umm.. Might have been The Tate in '16. That's sad.

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: McDonalds. I think it was 3/14

Last time I went to a party: No idea.

Last time I played a board game with more than two people: Hmm.. well, if we count RPGs, 3/12

Last time I went to the office: 3/16. We were still allowed to go in, but it was just me and another guy. I was a little froggy on a call and immediately felt guilty for being there and didn't go back.

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weather

2020-03-29T15:00:24Z

We've been getting some pretty crazy weather recently. Yesterday it was in the 70's for a bit. I was hoping to go on a ride - I'd mapped a 40 mile route in Boone county from the rail trail near Mom's house to Jamestown, IN, where my 4th Gr-Aunt is supposed to be buried. Rain came into the forecast pretty quickly, which nixed those plans for the weekend. Helena and I went for a drive, circumnavigating the rain temporarily and went and took some photos of a recently knitted sweater to go on her business website.

When the rains made it to our house, they were intense. Our street was completely under water. Some folks nearby were getting quarter sized hail. Today it looks like no more rain, but the wind is running at about 20-25 mph. It's in the mid 50's and I'm tempted to try to ride, but motivation is waning.

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generative poetry/lyrics

2019-09-20T15:17:01Z

I've fiddled with python/language processing stuff the last few evenings. I still don't know what I'm doing. I started out trying to do a really basic thing. I was going to parse sentences and words, store them in a database and store the ID of words that follow them. I guess the idea is kind of like the iphone predictive text feature.

I didn't get far. I started parsing sentences by punctuation and words by spaces.. but then found the NLTK tokenizing stuff, and it was just easier.. mostly.. I ran into the problem of trying to store stuff.. I wanted to iteratively read it into a variable at first, as a step before putting it in SQLite or whatever python can do natively... and, I ran into the thing where I don't understand the way python does (or doesn't do) 2D arrays. This was compounded by my lack of understanding of how to do an iterative loop when the iterator is from the data structure. ie: "data" is a list of sentences. "sentence" seems to be individual elements of that list.. but if I do "for sentence.." and use sentence as an index for a variable, I get told I can't use a string as an index.

I felt like I was doing something for a minute though. not that I really was, I just felt almost competent. lol

while looking up info on NLTK, I found an old post on reddit by a person who wrote something similar to what I want to do.. a poetry remixer is how they describe it. It's waaaaay more advanced than what I envisioned.. but, it doesn't seem to really work right. they shared the distro, and it doesn't seem to have been worked since december. When I ran it, there's a GUI, and it runs showing the background process in console, but it's not doing what the gui says it should be doing. It's fun to watch it though. it seems to be processing a bunch of source texts.. the bible, nietzsche, etc.. then it puts words together based on a rhyme scheme and I think some loose grammar rules. It's kind of like it's thinking. I can only get it to spit out two lines at a time.. and it takes about 5 minutes to run. so far they are all pretty old timey sounding. Anyway. I'm trying to walk through the code, but it's way over my head; spread out over a bunch of files, and not documented at all beyond "this cleans up some things". lol. I reached out to the person.. hopefully they are still around.

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optics

2019-07-30T14:14:24Z

For once, not in the office political/perception sense.
So my main glasses are big plastic frames, and I think they cause my face to break out, both next to the nose pieces (less often) and above my nose/between my eyebrows. It doesn't help that sometimes I wear these on the bike. I've been wearing contacts for a couple of weeks in hopes it would dry out my greasy face in these problem areas. and it did. Almost all cleared up.. but yesterday I wore my old glasses, which have real nosepieces, (which I thought were better for avoiding break outs) and in that one day I got a massive, painful subterranean zit above my nose. ugh.

I've been thinking about getting a really minimalist frame for my next glasses, in hopes that it will increase the airflow to my face. The best ones I've found are the Lindberg Nicolaj. They're basically just a bent up titanium wire with lenses and nose pieces. I've wanted some lindberg frames for a long time, but they are pretty spendy and I can never find a local place that has the model I want so I can try them on. I'm kind of thinking about ebaying a pair for fitment purposes before really buying them? I don't know.

The other option is lasik, which is both prohibitively expensive and TBH, kind of scary. but at the same time, I really am getting sick of fiddling with glasses and contacts.

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music and race

2019-06-04T01:28:20Z

Here's maybe something more interesting before the lousy stuff.. I paid for a real version of ableton a while back and have been messing around with it a bit. I had a chunk of time to make a tiny amount of progress on a couple of tunes. check out a couple short clips here if you're so inclined: soundcloud.com/jcharles00/couplethings

So the race.. It went pretty poorly. Link to the Strava report here: www.strava.com/activities/2416000026 I mostly attribute it to poor nutrition choices.. I made these rice cakes from a pretty common recipe.. but they had a ton of cream cheese in them. (for calories) The dairy seems to not have sat well on my stomach. I was already having GI problems before leaving the dorm.

I followed a teammate for the first 20 miles at pretty fast speeds - over 20 a lot of the time. By the time I got smart and sat up from that, my stomach was hurting again. The climbing was harder than I'd remembered. The descending was awesome, but there was always a cautious (slow) person in front of me and I couldn't take full advantage. I don't think anything I was eating was actually making it to my bloodstream. after the first few climbs I was pretty worn out.

I was struggling by the time I got to the first SAG stop at 65 miles. I had made pretty ok time, averaged 15 mph, but I stayed there for over an hour, a lot of that time in the bathroom. (thank god they had a bathroom! and thank goodness I packed a lot of wet-wipes) I ate some of the real food they provided, drank a coke and a bunch of water and chilled out.

When I got back on the road, I still felt like crap, and the heat of the day was really on. I think it got up to 92 (though the garmin shows over 100?) and there was not a cloud in the sky, and not much shade to speak of. From the SAG to mile 99 where I stopped was terrible. I averaged 10mph. I started to feel like my legs were coming back a little, but the heat was killing me, and I was going so slow that I got really worried about water. I was taking shade stops wherever I could find them, and kept bumping into a few other groups doing the same. at about mile 94, I was starting to feel dizzy, and was really starting to think about bailing. I made it to the unofficial water stop at 99 and someone else managed to get enough cell signal to call for pickup, so I figured I ought to go as well. Had I stayed in, it would have been another 22 miles to the official water stop, and then another 30 before the next SAG, and then another 50 for the last l

As I well knew, pickup isn't exactly fun. it took over an hour for someone to get out to us, and then another hour drive looking for another rider before dropping us off at another SAG to wait for a ride back to Emporia. I will say that the ride along the course in the Jeep really made me glad that I didn't attempt it, because it was rough. The Jeep ride was also kind of nice because the guy told us a lot of interesting stories about the area. (I say us, the guy sitting next to me, a late 60's Purdue grad/chemical engineer, was passing out/getting sick so I don't think he was paying attention. haha. Thankfully the other guy that stopped with us who was talking about puking up blood was in a different truck) Anyway, there were a lot of things I'd like to investigate further - he mentioned a neighboring cattle town that was razed after a guy got shot for breaking a law about crossing the railroad tracks. Apparently early pioneers got paid to build stone walls everywhere by the government as a defense in case the civil war made it out that far. There were a lot of cool stone structures surviving, and I was a little jealous that Indiana doesn't have much that cool - but it made sense, we did log cabins because we had trees, they just had rock. The guy also offered me some of the KFC he had in the back. lol.

Anyway, it sucks, but whatever. I saw some friends I hadn't seen in a while. Got to pet a puppy and some kittens, got to see some more of the flint hills, met some nice locals, etc. That said, I really don't want to ride a bike for a while, and I'm not ever doing this race again. I had kind of hoped for redemption this time, but I think I just need to accept that I can't do it.

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