Saturday we treated Finn to her first IKEA visit, venturing down to College Park in search of picture frames and some other minor items. Even though she was disappointed at the lack of merchandise in the downstairs marketplace (they’re remodeling, so there’s about 1/20th of the usual stuff available) she bounced up and down excitedly in the cart and flirted with everyone she saw.
Sunday I took her shopping with me right after her morning nap, and we hit a grand total of five stores before it was time to head home. We shopped for gel repellent to combat the infestation of tiny ants we’ve had since the rain started, bought some small items at the Home Depot, hit two different auto parts stores to find a fuel hose for the Scout, and the grocery store. Everywhere we went, she got smiles and laughs and waves, and she was content to bounce in the backpack, sit on my shoulders (and eat my hair), or simply ride on my hip while I took care of business.
Our garden is coming along nicely. We’ve got three healthy broccoli plants bearing fruit, our cukes are all flowering and climbing, and we’ve got tomatoes coming in. The asparagus seems to be doing well, although the first trench we dug is flooded completely. We took some time last week to pinch the tomato plants back drastically in the hopes that they won’t get leggy and grow out of control as in years past, and it seems to be working. We also took some time last night to wrap the grape arbor in netting to prevent the birds from feasting; it looks like we’ll have another bumper crop of grapes this year.
In the afternoon, I replaced the aforementioned fuel filler hose on the Scout. After some wrangling with a balky hose clamp, I got the new one in place and took it for a test fill in the afternoon sunshine: success.
Here’s a picture from two weekends ago with Finn and I in Easton. This was about 7:30 AM, after we’d covered a couple of miles in a fruitless search for coffee on a Sunday.
Date posted: June 17, 2009
| Filed under finn | Comments Off on Out for a walk in Easton
There’s been a lot going on around Idiot Central lately; too much to list here. Suffice it to say we’re all fine and running as fast as we can to keep up. More later, promise.
Date posted: June 16, 2009
| Filed under life, photo | Comments Off on I’m Still Here.
Wow. So we had a couple of people inquire about internships here at the office this summer, and apparently they were vetted and culled down to a few likely candidates. I heard yesterday that all of them have withdrawn, which isn’t all that surprising, but the story that gave me pause was the candidate who found out the internship wasn’t paid, and thus dropped out.
At the risk of sounding ancient, internships during my college years were always unpaid, and usually somewhere distant, which meant we had to drive to D.C. on our own dime (or catch a ride in someone else’s rattletrap car) to reorganize someone’s flat files or clean out a utility closet and find a way to eat Ramen noodles quietly in the back room without messing up one of two good dress shirts. Nobody I knew was actually designing anything. The whole point was to make connections and get a foot in the door somewhere, anywhere.
We’re in the middle of a recession, you dumbass. You’re not getting paid to be here.
Now get off my lawn.
Date posted: June 4, 2009
| Filed under art/design, humor | Comments Off on Unreasonable Expectations.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
