Seeking

Back at the beginning of the year I mentioned something about folk music. So here’s what that’s all about.

In 2023 I was re-listening to the Kingkiller Chronicle books on audiobook, a format that I think really works for that series. I’ve listened to those books about a half dozen times and the thing that always stuck with me is how much Kvothe, the protagonist, constantly drones on and on about how much he needs to play music in order to survive. Now, I grew up playing viola¹ in the school orchestra and learning via (admittedly poorly administered) Suzuki Method and I was starting to crave playing again, but I just couldn’t use that tiny old viola. I figured I’d look around for something more like what Kvothe plays, the lute.

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When I was between 10 and 13, my dad started to raplidly collect a series of dead-end telecommunications technologies. That’s not fair, it was only the one IBM beige landline phone with a screen that could tilt to make the basement flourscent lights glare across the cheap plastic a little worse.¹ But the big thing we got was a dial-up internet connection which I fell in love with immediately, particularly the Yahoo Kidz services which lead me to the rest of Yahoo, including the chats. Precious little wizlet I was, I would hang out in the most mature sounding rooms possible, mainly the default “Philosophy” room.

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TL;DR

I am coming back from the dead to unveil my new page, Nyetcooking, a page I initially created as a means of bypassing their paywall. This is actually a pretty useful little tool, which is a nice change of pace from making a shitty Gematria calculator and a day calendar for a system that’s been disused for over two centuries.

The Long Winded Story Before the Recipe

So I was minding my own business, trying to find a recipe for banana bread¹ when I come across one NYTimescooking had hidden from me. I don’t like that. I open up devtools on the page to see what layer I need to delete to see the rest of the rendered page, and lo and behold, there is already a wonderful little JSON object there with all the recipe data I need. As an engineer who hates frontend work, this excites me. Data? Structured?

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I’m still alive, I swear. You can check my pulse. It’s still sorta going.

I need to write more posts for this blog, if only to reflect on my own feelings a little bit more in writing. Maybe journaling again would be a good idea, maybe publishing it out to the world like this.

Updates have been sparse, but that’s to be expected. The toddler has taken up a ton of my time, much to my joy and amusement. Unfortunately, days have started to blend together into the same mush, which isn’t great. I need to start breaking up my weeks a bit more and going into the office instead of simply WFH all the time, if only to prevent myself from getting into a “every day is the same day” funk.

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An Old Man Reminisces

The first grill I ever bought was a Weber kettle. Christ, I was young then. Young and stupid. The first time my roommate and I tried to light that thing was on the balcony of our third floor apartment. Central Ohio didn’t really get hit hard by hurricane Ike but a storm was definitely rolling in from the east. We set the grill up on the north side of the building and couldn’t get the damn thing lit for all the wind, so we used more and more lighter fluid. The lid came into play in short order, thankfully, and we ended up letting the thing rust out on the balcony. I don’t know if we were more afraid of the grill or my own asinine stupidity, but it was definitely fear that kept me from using that thing much more.

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The Long Boring Part Before the Recipe

Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite thing to cook every year. It really only got big for me when I was 19, my group of friends ended up starting a friendsgiving a tradition that has so far lasted for 15 years. It’s been my favorite day of the year every year and as I’ve grown up and started my own family I’ve carried that love for that event over to the holiday proper.

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This is a short story I found in my old Blogger profile while I was cleaning things out. The date on this is 3/22/2010, which seems like it checks out to me. I remember writing this after taking some adderall to study and ended up cleaning the whole apartment, writing a single page of legible fiction, and then failing out of community college.

I’m posting this here because I lost it for 13 years. I never thought I’d see it again and I want to keep it so I can go back and wish I had the guts to edit this and make it something worth my time. Presented without further ado: Confessional. I warn you, it’s not great.

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I made a fun little website called sansculottid.es all about the French Republican Calendar. If you’re not familiar with the calendar and why I think it’s cool, go immediately read Ursula Lawrence’s excellent introduction to her French Republican Wall Calendar.¹ Her calendar’s focus on the natural elements really drew me in, and I really think this part stands out.

The authors of the original calendar thought carefully about when to honor each item. If they did it right, this version should at least be somewhat predictive of what will come into season when. For example, rhubarb almost always appears in the grocery store within a week of Rhubarb Day. Tulips, violets, and lilacs also tend to appear in sync. And for those of us living in northern climes, there is something truly appropriate about assigning coal, peat, and manure (yes, manure) to the depths of January.

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My go to move when making a character for any TTRPG is to make the Zealot of a Small Order. A lot of the time for me this takes the form of a Lawful Neutral dwarf cleric who is utterly devoted to one very specific reading of one very particular facet of one domain a given major deity.¹ It’s so fun and easy to come up with a character concept that has an interesting perspective by taking that reading to its logical conclusion at a Heroic 11² I like that Zealots of Small Orders tend to be earnest weirdos who seldom fit in. I love the idea of dedicating your life to an aberrant perspective on minutae.

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I really haven’t used my Windows machine much since getting the Mac for work. I should probably stop that, it’s just…so much more convenient to use the Macbook in most cases. I mean, it certainly helps that it’s portable and not tied to one desk location, but I’m usually at that same location using the same monitors for the Windows desktop.

I guess the problem is I mainly use this machine for gaming and since the baby I haven’t really been able to dive into games like I used to. Maybe that will change, maybe not, but the one thing I do know for certain is I have been enjoying setting up this machine to use WSL 2 in as many cases as possible. I never really had to spend to much of my time developing anything specifically for Windows and I honestly can’t imagine a world where that would happen anymore. With the power of containers it’s kinda pointless to do anything but run Linux nodes and ship your software in a container. In the long run, I kinda expect to see the death of Windows development for the Enterprise.¹

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