@lordbowlich@hackers.town

This is my official post to say that from today, May 1st, until July 1st, I will be taking my annual fast from social media, news, and the internet in general (or as much as I can).

Hope to see everyone back here in a couple of months!

This is my official post to say that from today, May 1st, until July 1st, I will be taking my annual fast from social media, news, and the internet in general (or as much as I can).

Hope to see everyone back here in a couple of months!

I'm too exhausted for eulogies at this point.

After three weeks being stuck down in the city trying we returned last night to a dogless-house.

Those two have been with us for almost nine years. They were so very much the centerpiece of our household.

Now it's just too quite here. There's no one to eat the carrot peelings and other scraps while I cook.

I can't even really escape into the woods, since who will go hiking with me? Who will sit by my side while I lounge at camp?

We lost Rowdy the basset hound yesterday morning.

He was recovering from his heart surgery and an AirBnB we rented in the valley, and for the first four days with us he was steadily improving although he was still breathing very heavily and panting.

He started acting restless on Wednesday night. He sat up in bed, and just would not lay down. I sat up with him all night, and he slept only an hour or two.

We made an appointment with his surgeon for the next day, and fiddled with his pain meds. But he passed away on us in the car ride over to the clinic.

https://www.wmicentral.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/usfs-plans-to-decimate-the-heber-wild-horses/article_440ad046-3478-5b96-b80e-92607a8ccdd6.html

Not every day you can legitimately use "decimate" in a headline.

Starting to get close to that time of the year where I go on a several month fast of my internet usage.

It's already slowly starting due to just being too damn busy with life to be online... but starting May 1st, I will probably be off of Mastodon, Matrix, and everything else until June.

I'll still pop on if someone DMs me, but I'll be pausing on casual browsing of the 'net to focus more on reading inscriptions in dead trees.

https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/

It's that time of year again.

Time to watch the world burn.

Literally.

https://vickiethewonderdog.com/

Vickie passed away on my lap in the early hours of this morning.

We rescued her from the pound in Sioux Falls, SD. She had been used in a puppy mill, shot once with a shotgun and had a respiratory infection that shook the house -- was not potty trained and never did quite understand the idea.

Over the nine years she spent with us she shed a lot of her fears and came to trust us and be a great home-office companion.

She could out hike us all. And when she grew old we carried her for miles.

She was wickedly clever. No fence could ever container her. She once figured out how to get on a counter by using a lazy-Susan as a ladder.

One blizzard in Wyoming she disappeared for the night and returned proudly with the neighbor's hen. She would dig up ground hogs in the yard. Sit patiently by a tree and wait for hours for a squirrel to make the strategic mistake of touching ground.

I will deeply miss her in my life, but cherish the moments we had together.

For my next trick I will empty my savings account in an attempt to not have all my dogs die on me in the same day.

Really enjoying all this characterization and build up before some tragedy leads @vortex_egg into turning their disinformation research into super-villainy and the construction of a mind-control network.

Started watching Laid Back Camp since... hey I like camping, and need something calm to watch right now.

And while it is kind of nice to watch right now since I'm not in a position to be camping...

It feels an awful lot like an extended commercial for REI.

My toots on the recent matter...

It's a pity to see that the FSF is really just a cult of personality without any substance. However, it is a relief to see that there are so many projects and other institutions that pretty much make FSF irrelevant to the entire notion of free-software.

I never really read or paid any attention to RMS until I donated to FSF a few years back... and their newsletter was so much fanning over him. So I shouldn't be surprised that they can't see a future for free-software without him.

Thankfully, I don't really see free-software as having any need for him in the last twenty+ years, if it ever did. Certainly plenty who've contributed code commits over the years to projects who never once read a word of RMS.

So it's no big loss.

I've been playing around with using php -a as a repl for testing some php clients.

The one downside I'm running into is that it isn't possible to hot-reload a class once it's defined. So if I find that I need to make a change in a class that was already loaded, I need to exit the interactive shell and start over... loosing any state that I might have already built up.

The psychology of goals seems interesting.

Like I got a pedometer several years back and I set my initial goal at 10,000 steps a day. Which I never accomplished. I would look at my pedometer, see that I had done only 5,000 steps and decide it would be too much effort to get the other 5k.

So I set my goal at 7,000. Slightly above what I'd do without any effort. Then I started averaging 15,000 steps a day because I'd look at the pedometer -- see that I was just short for the day, set out get those last few steps... and then just keep going.

Efficiency is a ruthless god.