The most recent non-technical posts to Joey's blog.
I'm trying to work on having days that are somehow individually memorable this year. So far..
0 (leap day)
Finally tackled the chapter on monads. I'd read various explanations a year ago, but was swimming in syntax I didn't understand. After percolating for a year, and learning to read the syntax better, monads turned out to make very simple sense.
(I can't say the same about Johnny Monad.)
I had been meaning to write sometime about a method I used in ikiwiki to let expressions in a mini-language, that normally are evaluated to match a set of pages, instead be evaluated to explain why they succeed or fail. It's a cute technique, though hard to explain. Now I'm pretty sure it's just a monad. So I don't have to explain it!
1
Visiting Abram's falls this time of year, the canyon is in constant wintry shadow. The falls are not frozen, but have icicles twice my height, and there are rank upon rank of icicles all down the walls, an ice cathederal.
It's a bright sunny day, but on the whole hike, I only get into the sunlight once, briefly, at the top of the giant steps. Then back into the shade. Back at my car, I'm suprised that it's only 3 pm, feels like it should be 5.
Made a pecan pie with daddy's pecans and eggs.
2
A grey day with snow and worse. The paper's rss feed repeats "dozens^Whundreds of wrecks" over and over, as if to make up for there being no 60 point type.
I'm reading Ted Nelson's book Geeks Bearing Gifts. The chapter summaries seem better than the actual book. And the on-demand printing makes me think I'm reading a poorly laid out web page, rather than something typeset. But I love that he goes all the way back to the invention of the alphabet and of hierarchical categorization and suggests all the basis for modern computers is arbitrary and/or wrong.
Eating ginger duck downtown I look up and a pizza delivery guy has slid out of control right in front of me and crashed.
I was asked for my borscht recipe. This is loosely derived from a recipe that is really weird -- it says to throw away the beets! Both that recipe and mine are probably very unauthentic. But good.
6 cups water
3 medium size beets
2 medium size potatoes, quartered
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1 stalk celery, chopped -- optional
1/2 a bell pepper, chopped (red or green) -- optional
1/3 cup butter
1/2 to 1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup tomatoes (fresh are best, canned or tomato paste + water is ok)
1/4 cup milk
2 cups finely chopped cabbage
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon dried dill weed
sour cream
Put water in a large pot on high heat. Add beets, potatoes, carrots, celery, and bell pepper. Cover and boil until potatoes are tender.
Meanwhile, melt butter in a skillet. Saute onion in butter until tender, about 5 minutes. Stir in tomatoes, reduce heat to medium low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes.
Remove half of sauce from skillet into a medium size bowl. Add cabbage to remainder of sauce in skillet and cook coverted on medium low heat, stirring occasionally for ten minutes, or until tender.
Reduce heat on pot to a simmer. Remove beets from pot and set aside to cool.
Remove quartered potatoes and add to bowl with sauce. Mash potatoes, adding milk, until creamy. Stir mashed potato mixture into soup in pot.
Grate beets, removing skin if desired, or grating it in. Combine grated beets and cabbage into pot. Add vinegar to taste (optional but recommended with sweet beets). Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in a teaspoon of dill.
Cover and cook for at least another 5 minutes on low heat, then let it cook in its residual heat for as long as desired.
Serve hot, garnished with sour cream and dill.
Happy solstice! High point of the season for me, and today was a two party day. My sister has reached the point where a good b-day present for her is merging the blog style comments branch into ikiwiki and installing linux on yet another laptop. So we had a little installation party with cake and Carcassonne. Except for wireless it was a success. Since I outsourced the other present to the UK, perhaps someone can sort out Christmas by telling me how to get Intel 5100 wireless working in Debian? ;-)
At the solstice party tonight, all three of the recent inhabitants of the bottom of Wortroot washed up on the porch, each of us looking a bit scraggly (especially the current resident). Jeremy told this story:
His friend decided to drive his SUV down the driveway to the farm, without consulting with him first. (This driveway was blasted out of the hillside by amateurs, using dynamite, in an earlier era of life at the farm. It has been basically unmaintained since, progressively more eroded and rutted, and over the last 20 years only the Yellow Truck (with no brakes) has had free reign over it.)
He got down the hill ok, and he passed the small field, and then he got to the narrow place. (Where the creek is eroding the driveway away faster than we can cut into the hill to widen it.) And Jeremey told him to stop, but he kept on going.. sliding right off the driveway, and rolling the SUV into the creek.
(The creek here is, now that I think of it, exactly as wide as your average SUV is tall, and in a gully exactly as deep as your average SUV is wide. It must have fit perfectly.)
They tried winching it out. That didn't work. They didn't even think to ask neighbor Jimmie to once again haul a vehicle up the driveway. His tractor couldn't have gotten this one out. They had to rent a "small backhoe on treads, like a tank" to do the job.
Ok, maybe you have to have lived there to appreciate this. :-)
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I'm in Charlottesville for a few days. Got to visit the always atmospheric Crozet Pizza, and am enjoying a cabin at Misty Mtn.
Had a good long think on the drive up, but it doesn't want to come out as a blog right now.
- Dishwasher, by Pete Jordan
- Windfalls, by Jean Hegland
- River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
- Powers, by Le Guin
- Real World Haskell, by O'Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart
- Matter, by Iain M. Banks
- Ars Magica, by Tweet & Rein Hagen
Nice set of books. Pity I'm in the middle of all of them.
Lately I have a hard time finishing many novels, I think because waiting for the plot to play out gets boring. Although River of Gods has mostly just confused me with too many viewpoint characters. And by this, where each box is a chapter, and that big box I'm just at the start of scares me:
Dishwasher is fun light reading. If I'd thought to bring it to its owner, Jay, who misplaced it, I could have picked it up from where I left off months ago and read it on the plane. Double oops. Oh well, there's always my next doctor or dentist appointment.
Powers is a probably great book by Le Guin. I hope there are many more to come, but the tendancy is to savor what's available. Also, I have it in dead tree edition, which I tend to save up for when I need them.
Windfalls is such a dead tree book, hibernating in the yurt for me to get back to them some day. I may have to start it over, since it's pretty involved, and rather out of my usual comfort zone.
Real World Haskell is coming along well, I hope.
Matter hasn't pulled me in yet, oddly.
Ars Magica I've been flipping through the PDF of idly.
Anyway, after all that, turning up a random story generator in 1 kilobyte of code couldn't help but feel like a relief.
Up at 4:30 am to fly to the Bay Area, then visited the beach, a posh thanksgiving at Mill Valley (stuffing with oysters in is the best ever). By the time I got to bed in Oakland, I'd been up for 21 hours, aside from catnaps on the plane.
I'm writing a piece of autobiography/alternate world fiction, using git. Whether it will get finished or be any good, or be too personal to share I don't know. The idea though is sorta interesting -- a series of descriptions of inflection points in a life, each committed into git at the time it describes. As the life paths diverge, branches form, but never quite merge.
Reading this would not be quite like reading one of those choose your own
adventure books. Rather you'd start at the end of a path and read back
through the choices and events that led there. Or browse around for
interesting nuggets in gitk. Or perhaps the point isn't that it be read
at all, but is instead in the writing, and the committing.
Spent yesterday at Anna's doing a computer clinic. Camped out in the yurt with a zero degree sleeping bag and a down comforter, nice overkill.
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By way of Tomoko and Mom.
What I've been up to the past few days, other than nervously refreshing polling and sites over and over..
Like Anna I skulked around an abandoned farmhouse yesterday, and found a pear windfall. (Better than expected pears too.) Actually, the farm turns out to not be abandoned, the fireplace had hot coals in it. Been too long since I was out there, and in touch with what's going on.
Found the At Play column by John Harris, full of enthusiastic writing about rogue-like games.
Inspired by that I dusted off my nethack fingers. I basically suck at
nethack, but still dream of ascending one decade. But playing it on a laptop
is such a pain. I tossed together
this script to
let me use the arrow keys with nethack, rather than hjkl, because vim has
ruined me.
Oh, and I've been making salsa with the last of the summer tomatoes, as they ripen.