My Distraction

My Distraction

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Ruminating

My sister was asking me about what's better between cast iron and enameled cast iron. I had a few thoughts about it, but wasn't sure about some of the practical differences, so I decided to consult the internet. This is an important thing about the time

Profiting

I haven't written in a while. At some point since the last time I did, Ghost, the blog engine I use, pivoted from just being a blog engine to being like a self-publishing, charge people for subscriptions kind of thing, like Substack. I get it. A business has

Mexicon Standoff

Expert Mathematician' on Election Fraud Actually a Swing Set Installer, Lawsuit Claims [https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nbk4/expert-mathematician-on-election-fraud-actually-a-swing-set-installer-lawsuit-claims] > A man posing as a math expert with evidence Trump won the election is actually a convicted drug dealer with no college degree who installs swing sets, according

Alternate Reality

I find this period of time, i.e. the Trump era, to be very interesting, intellectually, in that it can be so barren, intellectually. I collect a lot of scraps, some of which I've participated in, to chronicle what a weird time this is to be alive, but

Decency

I was out with Crystal last night, heading over to Laura's house to drop me off to watch their cats for a few days. Crystal was getting really mad about other drivers doing stuff she thought was stupid. Being generally inconsiderate in their maneuvers to people who wanted

Patriotism

Recently, a shooter in New Zealand killed about 50 people. I thought this was a good comment about it on reddit (emphasis mine): https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/b1kk2o/trump_just_echoed_the_new_zealand_shooters/eimbjkr/ "We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen

Dev Log - Guitar Trainer - Part 3 - Components

For the main part of the application, we'll need a couple things. 1. The 3D visual interface 2. The audio input interface For the visual part, we'll need a fretboard, and a note track, at the very least. We'll need some ability to tween

Dev Log - Guitar Trainer - Part 2 - Goals

Ultimately, I'm trying to reproduce, in the browser, the RockSmith interface, which has a 3D rendering of a fretboard, color coded by string, with notes projected out of it, based on time remaining to hit the target note. I also want it to be fairly easy to create

Dev Log - Guitar Trainer - Introduction

When I was first learning Ember, I didn't really know anything about MVC, and my first project was something I wanted to do because the Web Audio API had just come out, and I'd recently gotten an electric guitar and was trying to learn with Rocksmith.

Capture Notes

I've been maintaining a personal scrapbook of stuff like social media discussions of the day's news, with some primary source documents and full articles, because we're living in crazy times and I figure posterity will be interested in what it was like, beyond a

Primary TTK and Excitement

This was a post I made on the Destiny subreddit. It was received fairly poorly, I think, because people can't swallow 0.5s TTK, on gut feeling, no matter how much you justify it, in spite of historical precedent of lower TTK not being a problem in House

Where Destiny Went Wrong

This is a post I made on reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/831jx9/where_the_destiny_sandbox_went_wrong/] , presented here in full, with edit notes and everything. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's been a lot of complaining about Destiny 2's sandbox, with lots of suggestions,

Twitmok

There's this old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that's about a diplomatic mission, where they're making contact with this alien race, the Tamarians, and struggling to communicate because the Tamarians communicate only via allegory. e.g. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra&

Nice Things

I thought this was particularly well stated by Matt Yglesias (the context is that LL Bean has updated its famously generous return policy because a bunch of shitty people were abusing it): https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/962364433019256832 > It’s sad that it’s come to this. Unscrupulous people

Prohibition

I've written before about discipline, and how it's a two part process of making rules for yourself, and sticking to those rules, and how people tend to focus too much on the latter, while not being thoughtful enough about the former. Discipline is a plan, and

Racism

Every once in a while, I'll talk about racism on reddit, and I'll use the n-word, but I don't like to say "the n-word", because I think it's bullshit (I'm making you say it in your head --

Life is Hard

When I was wrapping up high school, I interned at a company that my brother in law cofounded, and was a VP at. He worked hard, made a lot of money, and shortly after, my sister divorced him, he got brain cancer, his company shit on him, he struggled through

Charity

Sometimes, rich people give stuff to charities. Good Will donations. Mailing checks to charitable organizations. Slipping some cash to a panhandler. That kind of thing. I don't think that makes them good people, really. I typically look at that and see it more as a donation to one&

Suicide

Note: I started writing this right after a Freakonomics episode broadcast, which is no longer timely, and never published it because the conclusion I came to seemed unflattering to my friend who committed suicide. I still don't know what happened to him. We hadn't spoken in

Loss

Note: I referenced this in this post, after Crystal's dad died: GHOST_URL /happiness/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the past few weeks, we lost Crystal's cat of around 18 years, and her father. Both were cases where it was a long time coming. Crystal got her second cat

Housekeeping

I have a lot of partially written posts that I just haven't published. Some of it is like self censorship. Not wanting to be too inflammatory. This is antithetical to good blogging, I think. Or what I think of as good blogging. Upon reflection, caring too much about

Rebalancing

Note: I wrote this a long time ago and never published it for some reason. Since then, the Destiny team have done a better job designing new bosses and their arenas. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not above arguing with people on the internet. It's generally not about fighting

Crockfordgate

Recently, a JS conference, Nodevember removed Douglas Crockford (Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts, creator of JSON, etc.) from its set of keynote speakers due to complaints made by some of the other speakers about how he made them uncomfortable. This is reasonably well documented here: https://paulstraw.svbtle.com/

On JS Frameworks

I realize I blog a lot less because I write a lot elsewhere, like on reddit, or in emails to my friends. Going forward, I'll probably cross post that stuff more. This happened on reddit today -- link [https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/4zzztr/what_i_

Communicating

I don't write a ton about programming. I think I've mentioned this before. The scope of it is so vast, and the requirements of any project can vary so wildly in cost and features, and what needs to be prioritized, it makes it difficult to pin

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