Christmas

Had an especially lovely Christmas up at Chez ElderKnapp. I don't know if it's because my brother's kids are older now or what, but it was just really fun, funny, dorky, kind, playful, and full of love. I feel very lucky. Matt and I got up there late on Christmas Eve, and we came home later on the 27th. 

I'm sad for my poor mom... everything just hurts her so much, and because she's on so many medications for other things, she's not allowed to take NSAIDs (Advil, Aleve, aspirin) -- so she's limited to Tylenol, which notoriously does nothing for my mom and those of us who take after her side of the family. So she just HURTS. She really tries to be a trooper (trouper?) and smile through it all, but it really takes its toll and it's heartbreaking. I can't imagine living in that much pain... and it SUCKS that one friggin' Aleve fixes it perfectly for 12 hours, but she can't even take that. Man. I keep asking her to beg her doctor for something, but naturally as soon as you say "pain" to a doctor they think you're shooting heroin or something idiotic. Like, can't they reduce the amount of blood thinner she's on so she can take one miserable Aleve? I don't get it. 

Phish in NYC

Friday the 29th Matt and I, along with BT and KT went to NYC to see Phish. It was BT's 93-millionth Phish show, KT's 4th, Matt's 2nd, and my first Phish show. The crowd was absolutely awesome-- so friendly with a kind, inviting, Burner vibe. Everyone was baked or tripping and the guards were lenient and friendly, which was refreshing, since nobody was hurting anyone/anything. We sat in section 115 which had a great view. The floor is general admission and people aparently line up very very early to get a good spot on the floor. From our view above the floor, we were all super-impressed with how everyone on the floor respected each others' space. Nobody pushed, nobody crowded or shoved. It just seemed great. 

Some guy who calls himself Malacoid greeted us when we got to our seats, and he greeted everyone else as they filled in. He introduced us all to each other, and after about 30 minutes we were all buddies. This guy Ryan (who was a long-haired, bearded Dave Grohl) looked like he needed one of my blinkie burner lights, so I gave it to him and he acted like I gave him a million dollars. It was great. 

Phish played from 8:15-10pm, and then played a second set from maybe 10:30-11:45. What amazing musicians! It was a pleasure and I'd love to go back. We slept in NYC (I booked two hotel rooms) and it felt great to have a comfy place to crash that night instead of driving home. FTN.

New Years Eve

New Years Eve was either going to be spent in NYC or spent quietly at home doing nothing... and then at the last minute it turned into a very small gathering (just 7 of us). Matt made dinner, we played Cards Against Humanity, and everyone went home around 1:15ish. We were absolutely maxxed out at 7 people (my house simply cannot hold more than 7) and it worked out fine. I was also happy to see all of the neat events happening around Wilmington this year. 

Phone Blather (BlackBerry stuff)

Anyway, I just got a notice that my beloved Blackberry Priv (it runs Android, so please stop making 2006 jokes about my Blackberry) will no longer receive updates from Verizon or Google as of 12/31/17, so it is officially end of life... which is some serious bullshit considering I bought it on the day it came out on March 4th 2016. Really? A $750 phone (yes, I really paid $750) gets barely two years of support?! Insane, man. Seriously.

Anyway anyway, over the last two weeks or so, I noticed that the micro-USB charging port has been getting a little wonky... like needing some wiggling, or needing to be positioned juuuuuust riiiiiight to get a good charge. This never ends well... and as of yesterday, the port is now completely dead. I'm sure it just became unsoldered as these things do, and if I had a T3 screwdriver I feel confident in my ability to take it apart, re-solder the connection, and move on with my life. Alas, I lack the right tools right now. (Gonna order them from Amazon shortly.) Anyway, as you can imagine, yesterday my battery drained completely, and now I officially have no way to charge my phone... which means I was phoneless all day yesterday. I don't get paid for a few more weeks, so I can't really afford a new phone right now (and even if I could afford it, what would I buy? I haven't even been thinking about new phones so I don't really even know what's out there. And something tells me that my physical-keyboard options are pretty damn slim).

So, late last night I fired up one of my three ancient Droid4s that I had laying around, but they all use an old-style SIM card, so I couldn't pull my BlackBerry SIM card and plonk it into my Droid4 and have it just work. (Besides, my Droid 4 is SO damn laggy, and it was horribly laggy in 2015, so in 2018 it is basically unusable.) And then I remembered... wait a second... My Blackberry Priv has wireless charging! I've never used it because I don't own a wireless charging station, but WHEEE! Here's a $30 fix for a $750 problem. And because I have the best boyfriend ever, while I was sleeping this morning, Matt woke up and went to Best Buy and bought me a wireless charging pad, so when I woke up, he was handing me a Qi charger that I got set up in 3 seconds and YAAAAAY, my phone is slowly coming back to life. I actually cried when I saw it charging up. It was like hearing your friend was in a horrible accident and then finding out he's OK.

So, what have we learned?
1) I can toss my Droid 4s now, because they're unusuable now, even as a backup. (But man, I missed that big-ass keyboard.)
2) My BlackBerry Priv has wireless charging and it works great... and I can use this charging pad for pretty much whatever device I wind up buying next.
3) I need to start shopping for a new phone, because my Priv is officially not going to get any security updates anymore, so if I wanna be a secure little technology consumer, I need to have a device that is still being supported. 
4) Verizon can eat a bag of dicks for selling a device and only offering support for not even two years. (I acknowledge it may not be Verizon's decision to stop pushing updates... it's probably Google's... but still. F Y'ALL.)


As of right now, my phone options seem to be:
1) A Blackberry KeyOne. The only crappy thing about that is the keyboard is visible/exposed all the time, so ass-dialing could be a problem with that device. (My Priv's keyboard hid away nicely.)
2) A Moto Z, which is supposed to be an open platform for people to design various cool mods for it. Some neat guys developed a super-sexy landscape keyboard mod for it that has its own battery, but that keyboard mod doesn't ship until the spring. 
3) A Samsung Galaxy S8, which has a nifty keyboard attachment for use in portrait-mode.

I dunno. I'm gonna see which phone of those three has the most horsepower and which one will likely be around the longest and go for that one.

[update] I'm gonna get a Blackberry KeyOne. I just watched 47,000 reviews and comparison videos by unbiased reviewers online, and even people who initially scoffed at a BlackBerry were ALLLLL about it by the end. So sign me the hell up. Two days of battery life is pretty awesome, too.


Lastly: 

I caught the plague that everyone else had. I thought I had caught it a few weeks ago, but I managed to fight it off with megadoses of vitamins... but now it has officially got me in its grips. I have yellow and green stuff coming out of my sinuses that I could really do without. We have a gig on Friday and I hope I'm OK, since we're headlining. I have NO voice, and it is excruciating to speak. Ugh ugh ugh.

It's supposedly gonna snow so I'm gonna go set up my snowcam. okbye.

We decided to spend our NYE on the TTC, taking a path from home to visit all four train lines.

Started off with Line 2 being shut down at High Park and points west because of an injury at Jane, so we hoofed it to Keele, being routed to the opposite side of the platform and then re-routed back normally. Rode the train all the way to Kennedy, then up two flights of stairs to Line 3, which was leaving just as we came up.

So a brief wait on the unheated platform, then the LRT showed up and we rode it to Scarborough Centre, where we were going to catch the 190 Don Mills rocket (a bus), except it was just leaving as we came down the stairs. This was the worst part of the adventure as the station was completely unheated and we had to wait 15 minutes for the next bus, and it was frigging cold.  AND we almost missed the bus because its stop was out of sight from where we were waiting but we saw some people running down the sidewalk and checked.

The bus went pretty fast, as it was an Express, but was frigging cold inside too, so we barely had a chance to warm up after the wait. Getting to Don Mills station on Line 4 was a relief because the rest of the trip would be thoroughly heated.  Line 4 is pretty nice but does seem kind of orphaned. It's just so awkwardly short. We rode it to the other end to meet up with Line 1 at Sheppard.

We rode Line 1 all the way around the Union loop and transferred to Line 2 unusually at Spadina because we'd never taken the Spadina pedestrian tunnel between the two lines before, and it was delightful as there was a person playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" on a Chinese Erhu (a two-string bowed instrument with a sound like a violin).  

Then the short bit of retracing our path on Line 2 back to High Park Station, getting home a little more than three hours after we left.

I mostly read a book (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon) and people-watched.

My Christmas Adam had recovery from a daytrip to NYC, a lovely Christmas gamer dinner party, discovering a new dive bar with an old friendly bass player buying shots, Santa selfies, and lovely nightcaps with the best of friends.

My Christmas Eve had visiting of newborns, wrapping of the gifts, free yams, tearing up at Christmas carols, and the watching of Doctor Who (the Christmas Special from some years back).

My Christmas had family visits, naps, snake cuddles, firepit mashmallows, and vodka infused gummy bears.

My Boxing Day had the ex's cat giving me $50 for the local bar, midol, Cabernet, pillow forts, play date planning, and introspection.

Who knows what tomorrow might bring. Living the dream.

I had to run out for a second, and Folkadelphia (it's a radio show) was on 88.5 WXPN. A song came on, and I listened to it on the short drive home and then couldn't leave the car until I found out what it was. 

It's a song called "You Missed My Heart," and it's performed by Phoebe Bridgers. It's a cover... but holy shit, the words, the performance, the arrangement just all took my breath away. 

Here's info about it. You can listen to the song there and also read the lyrics.

Just... wow.

The Christmas Plague

In other news, everyone around me has been sick with this two-week head cold of death. I've been feeling pretty cocky and invincible until yesterday when I woke up with a giant spike sticking into my throat from my inner ear.  

It wouldn't be Christmas without me having a friggin' cold.  Matt has it too... though I think he's a day sicker than I am.

We're supposed to be the in-studio on-air guests on WDEL's afternoon show this Friday to sing a few Christmas tunes and to plug our upcoming comedy show at Logan House on January 5th. Let's hope I have a voice that day.

Driveway Moment #2

Driveway Moment #2 just happened now. I am still in the car, now in a totally dark garage because the inside garage light timed out. 

I just watched Anne Mollo 's absolutely gorgeous story of Her Winter of Bill (as I call it).  I was absolutely enraptured. I got choked up. There were a few times I caught myself not breathing.  Thank you Annie-- really. Thank you. What a beautiful story. 

Watch it here-- she starts at the 37-minute mark. 

As I mentioned, I've been watching the new Twin Peaks...but very slowly.  The PVR has been a boon in allowing us to slack off on watching things, and sometimes we go a little overboard on it, but who cares, right?  (Spoilers probably follow for the new series, if you care...)

I watched the original Twin Peaks when it first came out.  Well, I caught the second half of the first season in reruns in the summer, and was hooked and had to watch the second season.  It was a few years before I even saw the pilot and the other first season episodes.  I had recorded a bunch of them on tape at some point, too, and eventually got the full series on DVD, and rewatched them over the last couple of years.

The new series is not like the original series at all.  Well, hardly at all.

The original series was quirky, sometimes brutal, a number of disagreeable characters, but with the axis of Cooper, Truman and even James, Donna and Audrey to show that there were people with, at least, good intentions.  There were the occasional surreal episodes--the dreams, and the excellent Black Lodge finale--but there was always some sense that people with discernible motivations were doing things.

The new series is a mess.  We're nine episodes in now, and the last few we've been watching with a gap of a month or more in between.  Episode 7 was particularly off-putting, with its extensive section in the middle dedicated to nuclear bomb footage and cacophonous music.  Plotting is barely coherent, with scenes from the first frickin' episode still incomprehensible.

I've watched some, but not all, David Lynch movies.  I enjoyed Mulholland Drive, and I like the "most of it is a dream" theory.  "Fire Walk With Me" was at times a bit off-putting, but it made a decent prequel/coda to the series, and it had a certain unity of place and time going for it.  "Blue Velvet" was...fine, I don't remember it much.  "Dune"...well, it was Dune.  "Wild At Heart" I don't remember much either, but I don't recall caring for it that much.

"Inland Empire" was a mess too.  I gather that he was writing scenes as they went, so it's no wonder it was incoherent.  There are sequences I remember, mostly near the beginning and near the end, but I couldn't tell you what happened in the middle.  And that's what the new Twin Peaks is like.

My theory is that David Lynch doesn't give a crap anymore, and is trolling the people who clamoured for a new Twin Peaks series.  He puts in as many of the old actors as he can (or will agree to it), but doesn't always give them much to do--Jacoby just gets to swear a lot on Youtube while Nadine watches his videos, Jerry gets lost in the woods...  His own character, Gordon Cole, is central to the closest thing we have to a plot.  There's what looks like occasional stunt-casting--Amanda Seyfried is wasted, Michael Cera's appearance as Andy & Lucy's son is excruciatingly painful.

And the best thing about the original series, the consistent throughline, the backbone, was Agent Cooper.  So what does the new series have?  First, we have the "bad Cooper", the evil version from the plot-twist ending of the origial series, who's grown his hair long and is now an amoral criminal and killer, who seems to have some weird abilities.  And then there's the "good Cooper" trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years, who escapes through a sequence which is expectedly surreal, but generally good, and ends up replacing the hapless Dougie Jones.  And seems to have suffered a lot of brain damage in the process, because he's spent half a dozen episodes as someone who only repeats what you say to him, an "idiot savant" who can spot slot machines about to pay off and, somehow, insurance fraud.  Maybe he'll "snap out of it" and return to the old Cooper before the end of the series, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.

Lynch is screwing with us.  He's showing us that we really didn't want a new Twin Peaks series at all.  I'm used to, say, 80's bands getting back together and recording new material, and generally what happens is new music which is not like the music of their heyday that everybody loved, but like the latter-day stuff that they coasted on for a little while.  I would have been happy with a new Twin Peaks series that was up to the level of the second half of the second season, where they floundered a bit, but it was watchable and often funny.  Instead we get Twin Peaks filtered through Inland Empire, and it's kind of crappy.

Last episode we watched, #9, was full of angry white men beating women around and/or swearing vociferously.  I'm not the biggest fan of profanity myself, but it has its uses...and it was way overused.  I'm only really interested in about 25% of what's going on in the average episode (closer to 10% in episode #7), so why am I watching this?  In the vain hope that maybe it gets better.  But it's feeling like a goddamn abusive relationship at the moment, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through.

It's pretty and mild today. Just warm enough, you know? The smell of cold isn't really in the air right now. It will be in a few hours.

Have I said the cats are adorable? Well, they are.

In our house we don't watch as much TV as some people.  We make it a policy to not watch more than one episode per day, generally.  And my wife would often just rather read...so we tend to fall behind a lot.  At the moment, for instance, we are trying to watch Agents of SHIELD (where we still have one episode left in the last season, for heaven's sake), Supergirl (with Luke and Jinian), the new Twin Peaks series, Star Trek: Discovery, The Orville (a.k.a. the other new Star Trek show), The Big Bang Theory, and (when it returns) Timeless.  In addition, on my own, I am watching Doctor Who (about halfway through Matt Smith), Torchwood and Glee (finished the first season of each), and rewatching Star Trek and Star Trek: TNG.  Plus rewatching Buffy (and going past Season 2 of Angel for the first time) with Simon, and watching bits of Rozen Maiden with the kids.

Some of this has been complicated recently by the fact that the streaming service I use for watching the Star Trek series and Doctor Who on my computer still uses Silverlight, which no major browsers now support, so I have to watch it on the actual TV, which is less convenient.  But tonight I did get around to rewatching "The Immunity Syndrome" from the original series (with what I suspect is enhanced special effects, but I don't recall for sure). The last one, "A Piece of The Action", I remembered well, but found it a little too jokey.  This one was actually pretty good, with decent tension, not bad SF elements, good character.  I remember when I first watched it that I was surprised that such a thing as an all-Vulcan crew (on the Intrepid, which was destroyed near the beginning of the show, causing a disturbance in the Force) existed, but considering these days it's clearer that Vulcans were in space before humans, it's less surprising now.

I've been listening to the Mission Log podcast discussing Star Trek episodes, and I actually got a few episodes past their discussion of this episode before I stopped, deciding that I should rewatch these episodes.  Now I've been trying to make sure that I listen to the episodes only after rewatching (and with the TNG rewatch as well, where I'm still only in the first season), since I don't remember many of them very well.  And there's always the occasional episode that I never did get to see, too.  I can't appreciate Star Trek the way I did as a kid, the productions not always having aged well, but it's nice to revisit it anyway.

Or at least I haven't been.  Too many blogging platforms, too little energy to write.  I moved my Livejournal over to Dreamwidth, posted there a few times, and that was it.  Tonight for some reason I decided to click on the email reminders I still get, and here I am.  Read a little bit, but decided not to go all the way back.

If I want to keep posting and not get daunted, I guess I should write something quick off the cuff on some random topic, or a few.

Simon (eldest son) is now 18 and just finishing his first semester of university, taking computing science, but he's still at the stage where he's mostly taking other stuff, like physics and statistics and calculus.  And he's having more trouble with the calculus than the other things; luckily I remember a fair bit of calculus myself so I can help.  They're using this system called WebAssign or something where they submit answers online, and apparently it's both fairly capable of scientific notation and fairly forgiving of unreduced forms.  But it also only allows a certain number of tries (in this case three), and it doesn't give you the right answer when your guesses are exhausted (and it sounds like they didn't discuss them in class, either)...and usually he only comes to me after his first two guesses were wrong.  Hopefully he does okay in his final exam.

I was quietly happy to see him sitting with Jinian (his nine-year-old sister) on the weekend, working on a programming project.  I gather there's some framework for building Bullet Hell games (he told me the name, but I've forgotten) which features some programming, and he was patiently explaining the programming bits to her.  So that's nice.  Jinian's been struggling with math a little, but programming is easier than math, isn't it?  Or maybe it just seems that way.  I saw someone write recently that "talent" is just that stuff that you did a lot of when you were young because it seemed fun and easy...

Patty Lin is coming to town!

It's true. Patty is flying in on Thursday night, and her husband Mike is flying in on a Friday-Saturday red-eye because he has to work a full day on Friday before flying out.  They were originally flying out to see Hot Breakfast's Second Annual Very Dorky Christmas Show, but it has been cancelled because the venue sucked and basically didn't want our money.  So much for that.

So instead of having a Christmas gig, we're going to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi instead.  We're seeing the non-IMAX, non-3D version, because from what I could tell, that's mostly how it was shot.  (They said they shot a few scenes in IMAX format, but it was only a few scenes. Meh.) 

I bought tickets ahead of time on Fandango, and as of last week, we were the only people in the entire theater.  (All of the other theaters were almost max capacity... but that's because they were 3D and/or IMAX.)

In related news, two weeks ago was the 10-year anniversary of me buying this house. I still haven't had a housewarming party yet.  I still haven't hired a frau[1] (aka a cleaning lady / cleaning service).  I used to use a cleaning service when I lived in Arizona in the mid-'90s, and I kept using one when I moved back to DE.  When I bought this house, my fraus didn't want to clean my house, since they specialized in apartments, so I had to find a new service, and I never got around to it.  (Not entirely true. I brought one in, but I didn't trust her.  She didn't seem to be all there, and she told me that her husband worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and died on 9/11.  She told me about the enormous amount of money she received from it, both from his life insurance and also from some kind of government payout. She bragged about her huge new fancy house she had, and she never said "But I'd trade it all to have my husband back," which seemed strange.  Anyway, things didn't add up, and I didn't feel entirely comfy with her getting intimate with my belongings, so I after the initial "try-before-you-buy" clean, I didn't call her back. 

BUT!  Patty's coming to town, so Matt called around and hired a cleaning service that we both feel good about, and they're coming tomorrow (Monday) and I am excite to have a clean house again.  And I will gladly give them my dollars every two weeks to maintain a clean house. Hallelujah!

And in addition to the fraus, Matt also called Stanley Steemer to come clean the bedroom carpet, the great room area rugs and my grandmother's two green chairs.  I am very excited about that, too.

And maybe the plumber will actually show up and fix the basement pipes, and then my house will be as good as gnu!  Did I mention that I'm excited? Because I'm excited.  Yay!

Anyhoo, I need to get to bed because we have Bruce Springsteen rehearsal tomorrow and I have to be sharp for it (no pun intended).  

G'night!

-------

[1] When I worked at the law firm in the early '90s, my lawyer told me that the German word for "cleaning lady" is "heinemachenfrau."  I fell in love with that word.  Turns out it was wrong, and the right word starts with an R, so it's "reinemachenfrau." However, Google Translate doesn't acknowledge that word (probably because I'm likely spelling it wrong), and instead it wants me to use the word "putzfrau" which, dare I say, I almost like better. 

Advent of code is fun, if you like programming.

In December every day thru Christmas you get a little puzzle that you need to write code to solve. You get some text and some rules; a single value will be the answer.

I wrote a programming language (called SAI) a while ago and I'm using it to solve these puzzles. I may post a few solutions here, so if you want to solve them on your own, don't read further, or any other "Advent" posts.

-- spoiler --

Here's the solution to the first puzzle, December 1.

In the code below, source is the provided input to your puzzle solver and the two debug statements print out the solutions to parts 1 and 2 of the puzzle:

  set
    elements to source.split('') thru it-0 // note!
    previous to elements last
    result to 0

  each elements as elem
    if previous = elem 
      set result + elem 
    set previous to elem
    
  debug "Part 1: ${result}"

  set
    result to 0
    len to elements.length
  
  count 0 to len as pos1
    set pos2 to (pos1 + (len/2)) % len
    if elements[pos1] = elements[pos2]
      set result + elements[pos1]
      
  debug "Part 2: ${result}"

I designed SAI to be easy to read and with a minimum of punctuation and special symbols, so it looks more like pseudo-code than actual code, and in general resembles a typed out version of what you would verbally describe a program to be doing. Also, this program is certainly not as efficient as one could make it. But I believe that readable and maintainable are more important than efficiency, with very narrow exceptions.

Note that SAI compiles to Javascript, so is subject to some of Javascript's bullshit, in particular the strange handling of numeric values vs strings of digits. A simple and fast way of converting a string to a value (if you're sure it is convertible) is to subtract 0 from it; that's what is happening here.