deathmtn

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year. Remember the inevitability narrative around this thing? At one job, I was writing code for it, having been told more or less by upper management that it could be the company’s undoing if we didn’t address it.

- Job.
- Made dinner.
- Messed up my shelf. My toenailing (diagonal screwdriving) chipped a board, and scrap boards connected that way aren't stable anyway.
- Changed the graph in Flooding to render with SVG. It got rid of a distorted bunch of spikes near the end.
- Sent a logistics email.
- Emailed a friend.
- Sent emails to the education team leader, teacher, and speech pathologist about the audiologist report, which I've put off for two weeks, which is terrible.
- Sent an email to the guy's social counselor.

Pretty draining day.

The guy's friend came over, and they immediately started playing video games. I thought for a moment about suggesting they do something else after a while, then recognized the hypocrisy.

Got pain for a bit in the ol’ abductor digiti minimi for the first time in months. A year, maybe? Regardless, I gotta bring back the 20-minute typing timer.

- Paid some bills.
- Called the insulation guy.
- Attached a mousing surface to my wood keyboard stand.
- Job meeting.
- Started looking for Christmas presents. Did not get that far.
- Looked under the basement stairs. Found a tiny bit of vermiculite along with some fake wood paneling. At first, I thought this meant that there was vermiculite behind some wood paneling at some point. But a few weeks ago, I had found out that there was drywall behind the wood paneling. More likely, the extra wood paneling had been stored in the attic with the vermiculite (which we had removed a couple of weeks ago). At some point, someone moved it under the stairs, taking some bits of vermiculite with it. Regardless, I put on a mask, sprayed it down with water, got it into a garbage bag, and got it out of the house, and then HEPA filter vacuumed, and washed my fleece.
- Thought about what to do with Flooding. Found some global mean sea level projections and settled on overlaying historical tide gauge data over it.
- Took the guy to social class.
- Got groceries.
- Washed a piece of old fence that had been left in the little wasteland on the side of our house. Cut it into pieces for a shelf. Due to bad planning, I ended my with one less 8.5"x11" board than I thought I would have, but I think this will still work. The circular saw is still stressful. I read I can actually do cuts like this with a bandsaw, so I might get one.
- Went to the music programming group. It was just me and Joe. We caught up and chatted about the composer mills and Scientology. I took a closer look at other tide gauge data and started using it modify global sea level rise projections, then realized tide gauge data already spans 100 years and includes sea level rise because, uh, the sea level has been rising. So far, it sounds like a good fit.

Tried to lift a kettlebell but felt some weird left side back/leg pull, so bailed. Same with deadlifts. 13 pull-ups, 10 burpees.

The core of journalists addicted to Twitter is what kept it important and what made what happened on Twitter (e.g. Trump saying stuff) into news. I never thought to blame journalists, but it now occurs to me that they sort of outsourced their job, thanks to this post.

What blows my mind is the complete lack of self-awareness when journalist like Kai admit to relenquishing their editorial filter to a single corporate entity, wide open to not only corporate manipulation, but also from swarms of bots bought and paid, for the express intent of getting a story in front of them. And yet, even in the shadow of electing DJT president they didn’t learn their lesson. See, for example, this whiny piece of handwringing by Katie Notopoulos.

I’m a little bit more sensitive to this because journalism has a lot of funding problems, but New York Times reporters hooked on this stuff? Weak.

The Age of Social Media Is EndingThe article contains a list of old social networks:

Friendster arose from its ashes in 2002, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn the next year, then Hi5 and Facebook in 2004, the latter for students at select colleges and universities.

I vaguely remember getting a lot of spam from “jenny at hi5” but never actually finding out what it was. Now I know!

I misread the name of a track on the new Pulse Emitter album as “Marketing Forest”. That would something.

- Dropped off, picked up.
- Job. A lot of meetings, but stuff still got done.
- Met with therapist, went over ways to avoid re-evaluating decisions repeatedly.
- Fastened the tenting posts to my wood tenting kit.
- Made dinner.

I think that's going to have to be good enough.

Landphil from Municipal Waste is on the new Heavy Hole episode. He kind of has a quiet nerd voice, though what is that really. Anyone can sound like anything, including bassists in moshy bands.

If you want to sign up for a news-oriented moderated social media site, here is a link. I'm not really sure it'll be all that much better for people because it's another thing to check all day and get intermittent rewards from, but the moderation may keep it from getting toxic and fascist-growing.

Dropped off, picked up.
- Job. Worked after dinner today, for the first time at this job. It was partly because I wanted something done a particular way that required more work. I should have just done it the other way.
- Started scheduling a playdate.
- Contacted electricians about flashing lights upstairs. It turned out there was a setting on the switch that needed to be changed.
- Started filling out stuff to go before the zoning board; there was stuff I did not want to dig up, so I put it aside.
- Made dinner.
- Had a weird discussion with Client D. I was surprised by it so I didn't quite know what to say, but I can't fault them, either. We made a decision, and I cut and rendered stems and sent them to him.
- Cut the base of the wood version of the keyboard tenting kit with the circular saw, glued on the stubs. Cutting a large piece of plywood is way easier than small pieces of hardwood, but I'm still going to get rails for the saw.

I feel like I did a lot, but I'd be more comfortable if I had done more. I'm just going to have to live with it.

I was just thinking if I was one of those school-library-attacking goons, I'd have a sign that said "Frog and Toad Are Friends? More like Fraud and Toad Are Friends!"

I think my earliest memory of a descending bass line was in Saint-Saen's Marche Militaire Francais, in which the bass (and the entire string section with it) does a bunch of those drops throughout the piece.

It's way less intense in these recordings, than I remember, though, probably because I was playing it in a strings-only orchestra. So, I was making the drops happen but also there was no wind and brass, so nothing else was going on.

Ten-minute run, 12 pull-ups.