deathmtn

Whoa, I was trying to remember the names of the members of Teen Girl Squad this morning. I remembered all of them, except for, appropriately enough, What's Her Face, who's actually my favorite one!

Also, Billie Ellish reminds me of her.

Played some DOOM: The Boardgame with Tim this weekend. While it's not mind-blowing, it's very satisfying to experience this genre every so often. I guess the genre is "moving guys around to shoot each other using rules". In terms of complexity, it's somewhere between Space Hulk and Squad Leader, which works for me.

I asked a big kid (maybe 8?) at the park who was forcibly trying to extract a toy that the guy and another little kid had just buried in the sand why he was bothering little kids.

He thought about it and replied, "Actually, maybe I shouldn't do this."

I'm very impressed by the youth!

Tim's visiting, so I'm actually playing games. Niddhogg 2 is hilarious and fantastically weird. It's a duel game in which one hit kills the opponent, then you run as far as you can (hopefully all the way to the goal) before they respawn and kill you. And vice versa for your opponent, who's trying to get to a goal in the opposite direction. It's a wonderful combination of tag and something like Bushido Blade.

Ultimate Chicken Horse is also great. Each round, every player places an obstacle in a side-scrolling level then everyone tries to traverse it. Wackiness and difficult accumulates. There are hilarious deaths.

jetBlue

You may have heard about new JetBlue or Delta programs that let passengers board their flights by submitting to a face recognition scan. Few realize, however, that these systems are actually the first phase of DHS’s “Biometric Exit” program.

For certain international flights from Atlanta and New York, DHS has partnered with Delta to bring mandatory face recognition scans to the boarding gate. The Delta system checks a passenger is supposed to be on the plane by comparing her face, captured by a kiosk at the boarding gate, to passenger manifest photos from State Department databases. It also checks passengers’ citizenship or immigration status.

Formerly, I went straight to jetBlue's site to get flights instead of using an aggregate flight search site. Now? Never flying them again.

But I guess if the DHS extends their rights-violating policy and data collecting more broadly, I'm going to have to consider just not flying entirely.

Due to me mistaking which bridges across the river can actually be accessed from the path that runs alongside of the Boston side of the river (you have to be on the other side of the expressway to get to some of them), I ended up taking Tim on a 7.4 mile walk yesterday, from the Seaport District, along the Esplanade, and back to Central Square station. What I was actually hoping to do was walk along the Esplanade for a while, then cross into Cambridge to Kendall Square. But that bridge looked really long, and I saw another bridge up ahead on the map, so we kept going. And found that we couldn't get to that bridge. So, we kept going.

It was, at least, good to confirm that I could walk home from downtown if there were some sort of transportation outage.

I sat down at the computer to look at maps so I could do a little tour guiding and ended up writing a Node module.

I think I spent as much time on the rant as I did on the code in this new module, errorback-promise.

KRS-One's I Can't Wake Up is the weirdest weed song I've ever heard.

Super nice weather; three people (including me) at the pull-up bar today!

10-4-4-4-4-4.

I grudgingly started an async/await-friendly http abstraction. I have issues with the way it (and promises) subtly but effectively encourage developers to ignore errors, which will cause them far bigger problems than the extra typing it takes to handle errors as they come.

However, as of late, I've been writing programming tools for people that aren't primarily developers, and I think it'll help greatly with ease-of-use there.

I hate to jinx it, but it appears that earlier bedtime is solving all of our problems!

1-2-4-8-4-4 this afternoon. It was hot out. Was able to "chill down" as the guy says using wet paper towels before I got the sweat waves.