Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   buying liquor in Red Hook
Friday, November 30 2018
On the drive to work this morning, I was delighted to see that a crew was dismantling the Jersey barriers running through the bridge replacement across the Esopus just east of US 209's Sawkill Road exit. That site has been indelibly burned in my brain as the place where I lost and then recovered a brand new windshield wiper blade, one that works very well I'll have you know.
My commute was at a weird time this morning, and I got stuck behind a schoolbus picking up kids on Rokeby Road near its intersection with US 9. I've noticed that it's rare to see kids waiting by themselves for a bus; evidently stranger danger causes parents to stand around in the cold to make sure their kids climb into a bus and not into a windowless van. For some reason pickups of children from stops where parents are hovering take significantly longer than the few that do not. The parents feel compelled to have conversations with the bus drivers, perhaps to reiterate the many allergies their precious children are afflicted with (from never having been in contact with nature). I have a feeling the kids who wait for the bus unsupervised don't have any allergies.
When I sat down in front of my workplace laptop, I found that Microsoft had taken the liberty to update its software, a liberty I would revoke if it were possible to do so. This had, of course, required a reboot, one that I hadn't ordered. For a moment I panicked, not knowing if I'd saved the VisualStudio project I'd been working on. I was relieved to find that it had been saved, but there were other things tha displeased me. Microsoft had taken imperious liberties with my desktop icon arrangement that, were I not in possession of DesktopOK (a desktop-icon-arrangement-saving program that shouldn't even need to exist) my day would have started off on a very bad note indeed. The thing about a Graphical User Interface (GUI) desktop is that it is a spatial organization of entities designed to be interacted with, and for that to work (especially if there is any non-trivial number of them), their organization must not be changed except by the user. But evidently Microsoft has no problems with changing it on a regular basis in a manner that would leave user bewildered. I don't remember this ever being a problem on the Macintosh, but it's been a problem in Windows from the very beginning, evidently because on some fundamental level, the fine folks at Microsoft don't understand what the point of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is.
I had a brief meeting with my colleagues this morning about what technology to pursue for this app I am to build, and in the end we decided to go with the Electron platform (even though its bloated nature makes me die a little inside). The selling point seemed to be that it would be easier some day to convert the app into a web app if it were written from the beginning using web technologies.
I snuck out of work at around lunchtime to go to a liquor store so I could re-up my laboratory liquor cabinet. Using Google, I'd found a liquor store near Red Hook's main intersection called Sipperley's Grog Shop. It was a little higher-end than is necessary for my mostly-bottomshelf liquor needs, though it looks well-curated, so perhaps some day I'll make a discovery there. It may well become my new favorite liquor store.
This evening back home, I hooked a USB3-to-DisplayPort dongle to Woodchuck, my main computer, and then used that to connect to the big Apple Cinema Display. I expected to have more trouble with this setup, but it worked from the start, suggesting I don't even need that big fancy video card to drive the new monitor. (That's great; the more ways I have to skin a cat, the happier I am.)
So, briefly at least, I actually had six monitors attached to Woodchuck. To test the capabilities of the DisplayPort dongle, I proceeded to watch the remainder of the movie Embers on the Cinema Display (which I had on the floor at my feet). It worked great, at least at 720X384 at 30 fps. As for Embers , it's a simple, rather glum, but often beautiful movie. I don't know if this was the intention or not, but one of its messages seemed to be that we'd all be a lot happier on some level if we couldn't form memories. By the way, I totally predicted the ending of Embers, though I didn't know the thing I predicted would rise to level of a beat to roll the credits on.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181130

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