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all but the most Adderall-enabled
Sunday, June 28 2015
This morning when I took the dogs for a walk, I brought all my firewood harvesting gear and went to a place I've where harvested wood before, a place about 150 feet northeast of Funky Pond Summit (41.923019N, 74.105262W, the second highest hill in the West Kingston Quadrangle; Gallis Hill being the highest). Though it's more than a kilometer's worth of hiking back home, it's a nice remote location with lots of firewood and almost no possibility of getting in trouble for gathering it there. After I loaded my pack, I was able to preposition it on fallen trunk so that I could get it onto my back easily. It felt uncomfortably heavy and I haven't had much exercise of late, but I managed to get it home with only one sit-down break along the way. When I weighed it, it was 92 pounds of wood (that's not counting the pack or the saw), which is good for a first load of the season. I remember the early loads from last season weighing only a little over 70 pounds, and they felt heavy, though of course by the end of the season (this time of year) my loads were as much as 140 pounds.
Throughout the day, I tried several methods to dislodge the hung-up skeletal oak I mentioned yesterday, but none worked. So this evening I had to start another cut near the trunk. I'd been hoping to avoid that, since it's more dangerous to saw into a hung up tree than it is to pry or wedge it off. But I'd failed to fully charge my saw's battery, and it sputtered out of juice as I worked in the rain.
Throughout the day, I'd been eating from yet another batch of bean-mushroom-and-eggplant glurp, which is not an easy thing to get sick of (at least for me). I especially like it in toasted Stand & Stuff taco shells when it's been allowed to sit for a few minutes and the shells become a bit soft. Happily, this diet, which is identical to the one that produced a bad case of diarrhea a few days ago, had no such effects today.
I spent a lot of time today working on what I was working on yesterday, a project from last year built on the Angular.js Javascript platform. I've enjoyed working on this platform in the past, but today I ran into serious issues with its inherent complexity, example-poor, jargon-rich documentation, and the indirect way that information flows around in that environment. I was making a sub-editor that appears in an overlay and is supposed to trigger an update to a disconnected ("isolate") scope (universe of variables) after it is done doing what it does (so as to update the editors that launched the sub-editor). Angular works great and without much fuss when building relatively-simple AJAX applications, but the level of knowledge I needed to have to pull off what I was trying to pull off was overwhelming. It amazed me to see how deep the rabbit hole goes when working in Angular (for example, try reading this). I just didn't have the focus tonight to learn what I needed to know to do what I wanted to do. Mind you, I'm an experienced web developer. The barrier to entry for kids getting started today must be prohibitive for all but the most Adderall-enabled.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150628 feedback
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