<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

5/5/2025, 3:28:28 PM

Whoa, Rep. Garballey actually called me back himself! Not great at keeping web pages up-to-date but still the fastest call returner of any elected official I've called.
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5/5/2025, 10:34:11 AM

Our state representative, Sean Garballey, does not have a working phone number listed either at his official page (the number is now the Mass. Office of Tourism) nor his Facebook page. I guess not a lot of people call?
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5/5/2025, 10:19:51 AM

In the last four minutes of this Front Burner episode, a conservative strategist in Canada says that it is a 60-40 progressive-conservative country “attitudinally” and the fact that the left is split between two parties is what gives the Conservative Party a chance.

Living here in a two-party system, I still feel that’s worth the cost, though I haven’t thought about it deeply.
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5/4/2025, 9:49:17 PM

I've been measure how long things take lately, and I found out that it took me an hour and forty minutes to make kung pao chicken today. The book says it's thirty minutes of active time.

Maybe twenty minutes of that was frying raw peanuts instead of using pre-roasted ones, but still! It took me forty minutes to wash and dice the chicken and mix the marinade alone.

I'm still going to make it, but only if I know I have a lot of time. There's a bunch of weeknights in which I've crammed this in, without realizing exactly how long it took.

All that said, it was really good.
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5/4/2025, 9:43:20 PM

I had to buy a large USB drive to do it, but I finally compiled Aseprite on a Raspberry Pi today. Amazing. I gave it about a 5% chance of ever working after getting that first enormous linker error.
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5/4/2025, 4:14:42 PM

Eco criticized social networks, saying for example that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."
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5/4/2025, 2:37:10 PM

Umberto Eco:
If there is a difference, it lies between the text that seeks to produce a new reader and the text that tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street. In the latter case we have the book written, constructed, according to an effective, mass-pro-duction formula; the author carries out a kind of market analysis and adapts his work to its results. Even from a distance, it is clear that he is working by a formula; you have only to analyze the various novels he has written and you note that in all of them, after changing names, places, distinguishing features, he has told the same story —the one that the public was already asking of him.
People “making” AI music are not trying to create a new listener.
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5/4/2025, 12:19:23 PM

I thought, hey, why not explain how to make a certain kind of Firefox extension for the poor souls out there that have to piece it together from not-great MDN articles?

I thought it would take a few hours, but I'm really out of technical writing shape, and it took forever. I wrote a draft at the end of March, then ended up having to make fifteen revisions until it was what I thought was readable.
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5/3/2025, 10:51:05 PM

From a Canada travel guide:
One of Vancouver's oldest areas, Gastown faces the waters of Burrard Inlet and lies between Columbia Street in the east and Burrard Street in the west. The district grew up around a saloon, opened in 1867 by John "Gassy Jack" Deighton.
Today, Gastown is a charming mix of cobblestone streets,
Gassy Jack!
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5/3/2025, 9:36:01 PM

Back workout, 6x10 resistance band pulls, 2x5 slow deadlifts.
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5/3/2025, 5:54:53 PM

Drama! I’m going to grill, and this has happened.
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5/3/2025, 3:53:09 PM

This house is actually gray. Neat trick!
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5/3/2025, 11:04:54 AM

I stopped drinking coffee for a month, which turned out to not be a big deal.

It’s warm now, so I made iced coffee. If you don’t drink coffee once in a while, A) it’s really tasty and B) it’s really strong. You can *feel* it.
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5/2/2025, 11:04:23 PM

The greatest triumph of today was when the guy and I killed a fly.

Any time there's two or more guys inside of a house armed with improvised weapons, a ridiculous Ghostbusters vibe is summoned.

I had a fly swatter and the guy had a hand vacuum. He was also still wearing his judogi and had a really serious expression during our hunt. We kind of went nuts every time the fly moved. It was great.

I think we eventually tired it out. It rested on a wall, and got got!
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5/2/2025, 9:05:02 PM

I walked up the treadmill at a 15° (I think) incline for ten minutes, then ran for five. The run part is good anaerobic conditioning! I should do more, but I probably won’t. Eleven pull-ups.
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5/2/2025, 4:29:21 PM

I took the time to fork the NoScript extension so that when you hit the Custom button, it defaults to allowing these things only on the site you're on. I don't know why it's not the default already.

But because it's not, I have to click the select control and select the domain I'm on every single time.

Now that that's changed, the extension is breezy to use. The biggest thing I've learned from this is that picking from a select control is way more cumbersome than clicking on things.
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5/2/2025, 2:29:43 PM

I went to the pipe organ recital at Harvard Memorial Church. The pipe organ sounded heavy, and the pieces were a lot more adventurous than I expected. Burkhard Mohr is not afraid of dissonance and lots of changes. It was fairly proggy. Alex said it reminded him of Chrono Trigger.

Very cool that there’s a nearby venue to hear pipe organ music. I thought I’d have to go downtown, and even then, it looked like it was all religious music.
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5/2/2025, 8:02:41 AM

More than 300 years later, the tens of thousands of bodies in the crypt are providing scientists with a remarkable record of the poor in 17th century Milan.

…

Eventually, Tagliabue realized she had something unusual under her microscope—and that researchers had the story of the sepulchers precisely reversed. “The answer is no, it’s not soil,” she says. Instead, the blackish substance was almost entirely made up of human flesh, with a light sprinkling of brick dust and microscopic bone fragments.
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5/1/2025, 10:21:16 PM

Mark Bittman promotes the practice of grilling fruit a lot in his book. So, I keep trying it.

Grilled apples are great, and today's grilled pineapple was pretty good, but not amazing. Last week's grilled bananas weren't good, but I think that was the bananas themselves. And the grilled avocado was just like warm avocado.

But I could be doing it wrong!
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5/1/2025, 8:18:52 PM

Back workout, 2x5 slow deadlifts, 2x10 resistance band hip twists.
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5/1/2025, 6:48:57 PM

Mike Waltz, who was until Thursday U.S. National Security Advisor, has inadvertently revealed he is using an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages, raising questions about what classification of information officials are discussing on the app and how that data is being secured, 404 Media has found.

The most incredible part is that this was discovered because he doesn’t have the basic restraint to not check his phone while cameras are around, so news photographers happened to get pictures of his phone screen.
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5/1/2025, 3:35:50 PM

I finished staining and beeswaxing this cat shelf. So, you can make plywood look a little better, and it’s a kind of nice thing to do on a break.
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4/30/2025, 4:46:50 PM

Republicans want to tax EV drivers $200/year in new transport bill

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was amended with “except Teslas.”
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4/30/2025, 12:23:50 AM

Cricket jumps
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4/30/2025, 12:11:23 AM

My kouchi gari is feeling better during drilling, but again, not really happening during randori. I suspect it's that I'm not really moving in and trying to sweep from afar, but stiff-arming keeps me from moving in. So, this all leads back to needing a forward throw that can be done without being close so that I can actually threaten with it to open up other stuff.

I happened to go against one sensei and white belts for the other round. So, I got thrown a bunch of times by the sensei and not at all by the white belts, but neither did I land a throw that was not a counter. I probably should risking getting thrown more often in order to work on a forward throw. I do have a stronger hip twist now and should probably use it. Maybe with sasae.

On the ground, escaping kesa gatame is still blocked by my bridge simply not being strong enough. I think I'm making progress? In some situations, I can make space, but then I can't get my knee in fast enough to preserve that space. It's very hard to do a compound movement that both has to be very powerful and fast.

All of these observed shortcomings, of course, are going to lead me to looking at a jillion things on YouTube but not actually finding anything actionable.

Regardless of how well I'm actually playing the game, I do feel good that I can get through any judo workout at all. So, there's that.
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