Friday Notes (Nov 21, 2025)

This post begins with a bit of what I see as good news. We’re exactly one month away from Winter Solstice — December 21st at 15:03 UTC. That’s 9:03 AM USA Central Time, and I set posts to publish at 9:14 AM, so by the time you read this, it’s just under a month away.

Cue regular Solstice-Equinox reminder that the day-length changes very slowly at the Solstices and very rapidly at the Equinoxes [cue regular link: Solar Derivative].

Until then, here’s another edition of Friday Notes.

One of these days I want to do a scan to see which of my posts I’ve linked to the most. That Solar Derivative post would likely be a strong contender — I link to it in most posts I write about the Solstices or Equinoxes, and I’ve done a number of those.

The four Solar holidays are the only ones I celebrate beyond anniversaries or birthdays (kind of the same thing). I’m not big on the greeting-card holidays, especially the made-up ones (Mother’s/Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc).

[One of life’s little vexations: The abbreviation “etc” should end with a period, but it so often (at least in my writing) ends up at the end of a parenthesized phrase that is itself followed by a period. Writing it correctly — “…, etc.).” — looks too ugly to me. One alternative — “…, et cetera).” — seems pretentious. So, screw it, no period. My strict old English teacher would have suggested “…, and so forth).” Erudite and classical as he was, he preferred more grounded writing.]

That said, there is something about Christmas that I like. A small part of it is the snow — Christmas never quite rang true when I lived in Los Angeles; it was harder to get into the spirit. Of the three snow questions (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas), it’s the last one that disappoints when the answer is no. (Snow for Thanksgiving is nice but not necessary.)

I think most of it is that people — most people — are just nicer during Christmas. Or at least used to be. Seems a sharply prescient joke in a 1991 movie — the Chevy Chase line about “the New Cruelty” — pointed to a true future.

But I love the Christmas spirit, as I love the American spirit, even when they are seen more in the breech than the observance. I cherish the espoused ideals. Even if unattainable, they are worthy goals. The point isn’t reaching an impossible summit; the point is the worthiness — the importance — of the climb.

And there’s something about Christmas music I like, especially the rock and jazz variations. Come December first, I start using my Christmas playlist!

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I looked out my (home) office window the other day (Oct 24th, to be specific), and saw a sight I haven’t seen in the 25 years I’ve lived here:

Working on his (or her) tan, I guess. He (or she) was gone the next time I looked out.

Speaking of looking out my office window, last week I walked into my office just in time to see our local bald eagle swoop slowly down and land on a vent stack on a unit across the way:

I’ve seen him (or her) flying around. A couple of times on walks I’ve seen it fly fairly closely overhead, but usually I see it at a distance. This is the first time I’ve seen it hanging out (possibly looking for squirrels). And possibly the closest I’ve been to it.

It stayed long enough for me to grab my phone and get the shot. Maximum digital zoom, so the image quality isn’t good. The clear blue sky helps, and it turned my way just as I took the shot, so the white “bald” head is apparent. At first it was looking away and was all dark. I thought it might be one of the other local raptors, but then I saw its white head.

Certainly, no squirrels sunning themselves on rooftops at that moment.

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October started off warm enough but chilled by the end:

In fact, compared to the last 12 years, we had at least one record-breaking day (Oct 4 — 91°) and several close to or at previous records (Oct 12, for instance):

Compared that with September:

Which started with record lows but then got warm for the rest of the month. There’s even a record high on the 16th (92°).

Note that record highs or lows in this case means on that day in the period from 2013 to 2025, inclusive.

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Speaking of the weather and snow, we had the first sighting on the 10th of this month:

It didn’t last long and was only on rooftops. The ground is still too warm to host it. Love the carpet of leaves, though. The ground crew vacuumed them all up this past Monday.

All the leaves are gone from my tree. It seems okay, but I feel that it struggles somehow. It’s always a late bloomer in the spring — one of the last in the neighborhood to have all its leaves. And it loses them kind of earlier than most other trees.

I think it’s a Ficus of some sort and maybe not suited to the weather around here. Most of the trees in our condo are maples, evergreens of some kind, or oaks.

I suppose I’ll be out shoveling the stuff soon enough.

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Two Friday Notes ago, I posed the unmusical question:

I went over the real answers last time but suggested there was yet another answer (because I hadn’t restricted the answers to any domain).

Here’s that answer:

The simplest way to deal with i⁻¹ is just to remember that i⁺¹=+i and i⁻¹=-i. (This is only true of i, of course.) The algebra-savvy way is:

[The geometry-savvy way is seeing multiplication with complex numbers as rotation. Exponentiation is serial multiplication, so i⁺¹ is a rotation 90° counterclockwise from the starting point at 1 to +i. And i⁻¹ is a rotation 90° clockwise from the same starting point to –i. See the Complex Numbers page for more.]

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Last post I wrote, “For two weeks I’ve indulged in intense 12+ hour days on a self-education project in Python and its Tk module.” And it was intense; I’ve spent all week recovering.

At the tail end of the binge, I posted this Note on Substack:

The last 12 days have been an autodidactic rollercoaster of nearly bipolar “this is almost too much fun” highs and screaming out loud in frustration blackest of lows. 12 days of 12+ hour days trying to learn something I’ve been putting off for several years: Python’s tkinter module for making windowed apps. It’s a Python binding to the Tk software suite.

For windowed apps, I’ve programming on everything from X-Windows (ugh) to MS Visual BASIC (yummy candy) but haven’t explored windowing software options since I retired in 2013. Important (Windows app) tools I made decades ago no longer work, and I’ve missed them. Python’s tkinter module, at long last, allowed me to recreate them. Very frustrating journey but a happy ending.

Not bad for a guy who turned 70 a couple of months ago. This old dog is learning new tricks. I once again have two old friends: grep and hexdump. Windows-style and tuned to my preferences.

My body may be letting me down these days, but my mind still seems to be keeping up.

There has been a progression in how we interact with computers. Now we have touchscreens and voice interfaces, even the ability to recognize handwriting. Before those we had windows on good monitors, a variety of fonts and colors, keyboards, mice, and touchpads. Before that, we had text displays and keyboards. Earlier still, we didn’t have displays, only printers. Go back far enough, there aren’t even keyboards; it’s punch cards and fan-fold printouts.

I go back to those days (don’t miss them one bit).

Python, the programming language I’ve been using pretty exclusively since I retired in 2013, like many cross-platform programming languages, is essentially back in the keyboard and printout, or at best early display, days. It’s best at dealing with data in files. It requires a third-party library to even generate image files.

As it says in that Note, I miss having windowing apps, especially ones I made as highly customized useful tools. Such as the text file scanner grep:

Which has already made itself useful.

And now I again have a nice hexdump utility:

Which comes in very handy sometimes.

All this with out-of-the-box Python, which appeals to my make-it-from-scratch sensibilities (and one reason I don’t use Ai to do creative stuff for me).

For fun, I wrapped a windowing app around my random text generator:

The underlying random text generator is what I used to create the post called 6588648337950935760 back in 2019 as a New Year’s Day gag (along with an explanatory post on my programming blog). I’ve always enjoyed structured but random patterns (campfires, ocean waves and many others — Conway’s game of Life, for instance).

Something about a good random text generator tickles my fancy. To make it feel more realistic, the use frequencies flag tells it to use letters according to their use percentages in English text (otherwise it uses the alphabet characters equally).

This was my obsession in the first half of November. Hardly got anything else done, but I’m really happy with my progress and delighted to be able to make windowing apps now.

[There was a point around the halfway mark that reality outstripped my design foresight and forced a major round of refactoring. That mired me in a series of aggravating bugs that took over two days to eradicate. Meanwhile I was gnashing my teeth in frustration over the stall in forward progress when I’d finally gotten up to speed. Hence the aforementioned screaming out loud.]

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Long-time readers may know I’m not enthusiastic about generational Ai and LLMs for a number of reasons (environmental impact, copyright issues, massive amounts of intentionally false and misleading slop, and so forth).

That said, Microsoft’s Ai, Copilot, was a huge help in answering questions about how to accomplish my design goals. It produced working code snippets that showed me exactly how to do what I needed to do. Or if not exactly, damned close.

That said, the information is out there in all manner of tutorials, so the Ai didn’t make the difference between success and failure. But for an experienced programmer, one with windowing coding experience, who just needed answers to specific how-do-I questions … wow … no, I gotta go full-on street on this one … holy, fuck! It really is like having an expert who just hangs around (incredibly patiently) waiting to answer questions.

What it did overall was make it go fast. Instead of two weeks, it probably would have taken me two months. Which is why I put it off for so long. I knew it was gonna be a challenge.

All that said, I’m still not interested in its generational aspects. I’ll write my own text and make (or to be honest, steal) my own images. For that matter, write my own code. The whole point of that is how much comes from me.

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In a world of credulous fools, I like to think I’m an incredulous fool.

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For the electronic circuit heads:

Yes, why? I’ll explore this in a future Sideband, but I’m throwing it out there now to see if it catches anyone’s attention (and to have it handy online to show a buddy the next time we lunch).

A few hints: Don’t make the mistake I did based on the shape of the circuit and assume the transistor is PNP. It’s NPN. I’m not sure if I would have figured it out had I not made that mistake; probably not. Another hint is that it has to do with transistor construction and physics. The last hint is that it can eventually wreak the transistor — this is not a recommended circuit, just a sideshow attraction.

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To end on as cute a note as possible:

I submit this as a cockle-warming example of the old phrase “snug as a bug in a rug.” (Not that Bentley is a bug nor sleeping in a rug.)

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Stay blinking, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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