inquiry

> But what for? What do I care? Why do I have to be so > invested in a bunch of server farms communicating with > one another? And what exactly does “get better” even > look like?

In the context of “hell is other people”, “get better” likely has little (possibly nothing?) to do with technology itself (not that you were implying it does), but tends to be in the direction of a right number of the right people, leading to a nourishing mesh of mutually fun, interesting interaction.

> So, maybe try this: grow up. Want to be a 30, 40, > 50 year old Reddit user for the rest of your natural > life? Probably not, but then again maybe that person > does? Maybe correspondence with Internet “citizens” > with a 70/30 jerk-to-friendliness ratio suits some people > – but, I have no interest in passive communication with > people who are anything but stable.

Holy insurmountable requirements, Batman!

I'm fine with what I want to call cleverly challenging jerks. I feel like I can play. Or even if I'm deluded about implied skill stack, I want to play. And I don't mind learning I'm an idiot along the way, including being told so point blank.

<a few days later>

Thunderstorms for a while this morning sufficient to awaken through the earplugs. Just as well, though, as we got to bed at a reasonable hour, and I've today off work. Loving the sort of hazy mistiness out there, now, just a tidge before 7:00am in the local timezone.

My song lyrics acquisition thingie has been working like a charm. I'm still in the process of acquiring our main go-to's, which we fortunately made a list of in the past (beats having to finger through paper). Next gig is July 4th outdoors at the rooftop venue. We're practically the Beatles, for godssakes. Maybe even bigger than the Beatles.... :–)

(... bah whatever who cares ...)

Counting on other people is a delayed, self-inflicted ice pick to the eye.

In similar news, the part you can't find is under the instructions you set down because they made no fucking sense.

Also, that tool you forgot to move closer sooner? Reaching for it will cause you to lose grip on what will make no sense to apply a tool to once it's no longer in place for having picking up the tool.

Who the fucking goddamn inventing this fucking world, anyway? You know?

Oh, and please let us be careful to not plumb the depths of cord/cable incestuousness lest we become incapable of forgetting how it's all one step forward, 2++ back, baby... 2++ back....

Gravity. Friction. Entropy.

And yet there you go, ego sufficiently unfortunate to read this whining: vainly imagining you're going to make something of your”self” in such a world....

But, hey, you're young and............ well........ young......... so you've got all the time in the world to self correct....

<grins... smiles... laughs hysterically>

Oh, the joy of web scraping.

What was sarcasm. Why? Well, because of course you didn't really note all the patterns and/or their exceptions.

And of course the nature of some discovered along the way will beg for serious refactoring that's even odds on a tear-soaked keyboard taking an undeserved beating.

Cooler, drier atmospheric conditions are pleasing the heck out of this here humanoid instantiation.

Rough evening though, last. Some self-centric mental shit had their way with “me”. Couldn't remember it being all Mind Only for shit. We're talking a Raggedy Inquiry doll shaken viciously to emotional shreds.

Oh well.

Work's okay today. My manager doesn't like when I spend time on utilities, but it doesn't take long for numbingly repetitive actions to motivate that direction. So I'll have to make some shit up about something else taking longer than I expected. Ain't got no time for argument and/or verbal flogging.

Dig? (the 1960s lingo kind, not the shovel kind)

There's nothing to do about it, because nothing's actually happening in the sense that dreaming-it-is makes it seem.

So how do you like them somnambulist apples?

> Selfishness has become its own pandemic. It's time to > stop looking constantly inwards to your own desires. It's > time to look towards others. It's time to help the less > fortunate people we know in our lives. Be generous, > treat them well, and they will ultimately be there when > we need them.

What the hell does any of that have to do with the price of Pronoun Correctness....? ;–)

Ho hum, haven't posted for a while. As in like it really matters, right?

Productivity central, here... so much accomplished at the rental... fixed, shower hot water value relocated lots of small stone to make room for a gravel more in line with cars parking, spread the gravel after it arrived, created a couple moveable posts with a couple 10-foot 4x4's Qwikrete'd into large flower pots, employed them to create a sunscreen for the patio, much more “looper the new axe” practice, and whatever I'm not remembering.

See? You didn't need to know any of that. It's not like we're ever going to meet. Or even exchange private communication.

The point to this is/was... what was it, again? I'm forgetting what key the song of blogging is in....

Oh, that's right... for me it's morphed about 99.99% to good 'ole “getting my money's worth”.

Fun brewery outing last night, bumping into friends, the owner.. even the flippin' mayor. I think my wife might have talked his ear off on the theme of the local education system. But comfortable numbness prevailed over that and other human-sourced auditory noise sometimes referred to as “speech”.

Sights. Uh-huh. You guessed correctly. I knew I could count on you.

Off work today to attend to final rental upgrade details. And eventually embrace the Strat.

As tends to be the case in the world, the looper pedal giveth (e.g. performance dimension), but also taketh away (e.g. attention diverted from song immersion to pedal mechanics). It's also easy to become obsessed with soloing, milking particular sections too long, risking familiarity breeding contempt in listeners.

And I've no idea how to use it while performing with my wife, because how to communicate what was captured? When I'm invoking a capture? And if I repeat a section an extra time, do we wind up guessing correctly as to where to pick up on the song?

I guess it's just plain going to take practice.

> “I am” specifically in a spiritual sense. > > Is there a word for...

Words might be likened to a layer of diarrhea seemingly defining – not to mention hiding – a surface of wordlessness.

Don't believe me? Then why do we say someone with lots of words flowing from the mouth has “diarrhea of the mouth”?

Hmmm?

(Yes, I realize that makes this diarrhea of the fingers....)

> And, if I didn't lease an apartment, I would go back to > this way of living. Why own cookware? Why own an easy > chair? Why own anything to furnish a space, if there > isn't a space to furnish? Or a space that belongs to you > (me)? Beds exist, chairs exist, cookware exists, random > odds and ends exist – so just use those for whatever > hotel, or hostel or whatever it is you happen to be > staying.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the state of ones estate, so to speak, is at least remotely connected to where The Semen™ regularly winds up....

Okay, another fine day everywhere but on the screen. Bought a mid-range Stratocaster yesterday. Should arrive today. Very much excited. Probably dig the three-channel looper out of semi-retirement in its honor.

More progress at the rental. Down mostly to keyless locks, and finishing touches. We've already four bookings.

Also moved the lyrics acquisition-and-display project forward after it hit me my curl http GET requests were probably being rejected for not including a “user-agent:” header on the call, 'cuz she's been workin' like browserless gangbusters since adding that.

But I'm not going full-blown scraping, because we need only the songs we need.. and I'd also have to try to figure out the optimal GET pace to not set off scraping alarms. So/too much dicking.

> > But still I wonder about how to cultivate a sense of > > continuous partial wonder such that it is more likely that > > something in the everyday will catch you, just every so > > often. Perhaps that is one of the functions of keeping an > > observational diary, or of prayer. > > Perhaps it could be a pill. Microdosing cathedrals.

Maybe rent something good at periodically trimming back the familiarity that breeds contempt.

Hell of a productive afternoon, both the software nonsense and working on the old place. Installed four full-length mirrors on the backs of doors, weed-whacked, mowed, took a look at seeing if I could disable the locking of the external doorknobs as opposed to paying for new ones when we install keyless locks where the keyed deadbolts currently are (couldn't figure it out, got tired of getting internals grease on my hands), moved some potted plants around.

After that we discussed what's left to some Jameson shots and beer from Aldi's someone gave us (not bad..), a couple Marlboro lights.

Extremely satisfying. I could almost break out in hysterical laughter how blogging pales in comparison.

Work the land, humus beings....

Been doing fancier scripting things with tmux of late. I find the documentation (well, man page..) right around the corner of Mystification Street and Infuriation Way. But it still casts quite the shadow over sliced bread, so....

I also wrote a rather kickass pair of commands that can manage song lyrics for us. One can digest and reformat lyrics page html (after Ctrl-S –> HTML only –> save) from a certain online lyrics site (which I won't mention lest anyone lose their shit..) into a library of such. The other can turn a file containing a list of songs in the library into a set of html files in a specified directory that retain the ordering of the aforementioned file via “PREV” and “NEXT” links at the top and bottom of each sheet to make it easy to navigate from one to another per the predetermined order.

But, Jesus... the fucking games one must play to get browsers to do anything useful, right?

This time it was learning the hard way how zooming tabs seemingly mucks with whether text in certain html elements wraps... in other words, bring up a page, enjoy line wrap... but then zoom, and suddenly the line wrap isn't happening anymore without refreshing. Ugh.

And then it seems zoom values are... associated with URLs (so that if you close a tab.. then reopen with the URL, you wind up with the same tab zoom)... or... well, maybe I'm not remember the exact relationship. But what it translates to in my scenario is if I zoom a specific song's html, then follow the “PREV” or “NEXT” link, the page that appears isn't zoomed the way the previous URL's worth was. That almost feels like a war crime to me, for godssakes....

So...... that led to a workaround involving some CSS against the 'pre' element, as well as specifying a “zoom:” property value against the 'body' element. Thankfully some kind soul (if you believe in such a thing..) had already worked that out – although of course it took me half of forever to come up with the right combination of search terms to find it... because... well, what are the chances of different software developers ever using the same terminology, am-i-just-fuck-me-right-here-and-now-rite?

Yeah. I've come to despise software development. Just seems like a big fucking mess compared to how things were when I was rookie. And it's sooooo anti-social an endeavor. Just try talking to a developer who's in the middle of something (which implies they're at least a dozen things in mind they realized along the way they need to change but couldn't write them down because that would risk fucking up the code currently under their fingertips.. even as they agonize how they're going to test any of them... oh, and don't forget to make crufty temporary file copies that wind up numbering scores faster than a Putin colluder gets shunned (if not repeatedly murdered by a murmur-happy mob...)), but be sure to don your suit of armor first....

I'm just sayin'. If you think you want to be a software developer, be sure to stay single. And to love working 12-16+ hours a day. And find joy in gobs of time spent (see also: wasted) trying to find something you know you already coded... refactoring in ways that will become irrelevant in, oh, let's just call it soon enough to make you wish you didn't do the last refactor...

OH! And others will change things under your feet breaking the fuck out of your hard work, but since what you've written a layer closer to the user, well, guess what? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT....

And then there's probably having few friends who have any idea what you're talking about when describing your trials and/or tribulations. Throw your manager into that group too, who will furthermore never understand why – unlike your non-coding department cohorts – you can't create, stick to, and make a schedule....

And may all the deities who've ever lived try to help you if you're more a unix type stuck in a job that's 99.99% Windows....

<bashes head into table next to couch numerous times>

Don't. Just don't....

But back to the lyrics thingie. So cool! Once I've built up the library, we can create songlists at will, and it's just a matter of pointing the browser to a file named '000first000.html', flipping this glorious Acer Chromebook's screen over to turn it into a notebook, and then just click on “NEXT” after completing each song. Yay!

(In case you're wondering, '000first000.html' is a symbolic link to the actual first song's html, because it'll almost certainly always sort first when listing a folder in Chrome....)

And, of course, I don't really care which lyrics site I use to Ctrl-S lyrics into our library, because even if I have to start using a different site, I'll just have to stare at their song lyric html long enough to find patterns and parse out what the parser for current site html....

Oh... one more thing. Of course I didn't want to have to dick with a fucking browser with all their keystroke-turbation.. I'd hoped to “scrape” via curl... but of course the site I prefer has some kind of robots blocking shit going on... I could probably work around that, but it's not where I wanted to spend the bulk of my time for this.

Isn't life wonderful?

My last post led to something a la “can't find file, are you sure it was ever there”... kept trying the returned URL, but it never showed... post didn't show through the api either... kept trying... gave up... tried posting the same again... same deal... but now it's an hour or so later, and the API is showing both posts... of course with different number of reads... so now I look like a real doofus (you know, as opposed to the kind of doofus that merely writes cantakerous blog posts..)... and feel uncompelled to delete one of the posts because of how it'll roughly half the number of reads (which I suppose doesn't really matter...).

I suppose that confusing state of no-idea-wtf-is-going-on makes sense in some sort of mystical “pride cometh before a fall” sense given its content.

Kinda makes me want to rant about the in-idempotency of software, but... ugh... forget it....