Friday Notes (Jan 23, 2026)

Winter announced itself a bit earlier than usual this year. In December it settled in with a fair bit of snow, though some warm spells melted a lot of it. We had our annual January Thaw but are in the deep freeze now.

Maybe it’s winter. Maybe it’s the insanity of the last decade catching up with me. I find myself decidedly in the blogging blahs (and fishing ain’t gonna help).

But let’s see if I can whip up another edition of Friday Notes.

Memory plays all sorts of tricks on us, but it feels as if this has so far been a bigger winter than in previous years. For a while, I’ve been thinking of how I might establish some sort of “pain index” objectively describing the severity of winter.

It should probably include things like duration, snow fall, and snow depth. Maybe some wind stats as well. I currently record weather data (in a big JSON file) going back to 2013, but it includes only daily high and low temperatures (it’s what most of the charts I’ve posted here are made from).

I need to go back to the MN DNR website and get the monthly PDF files with all the daily stats. Until now I’ve been using a simple mostly manual process to copy the high and low temp data from the PDF to the JSON file. I’ve got a good start on code that will extract all the data once I download all the PDFs. A JSON file isn’t going to cut it anymore, so I’ll also have to write code to use SQLite.

Experimenting, I created this chart:

A rough cut in analyzing winter pain. I grabbed the December stats PDF from the DNR site and used the code I have so far to extract snow data for the chart.

Compare this to the usual hi/lo temperatures chart for the month:

You can see how the warm temps starting mid-month melted the snow, but then we got hit after Christmas with a bunch more. The repeated days of snowfall made for lots of shoveling. Enough to get a bit sick of it already.

Comparing December to previous years:

Our high and low temps early in the month were lower than average, though the last part of the month was on the warmer side. Writing this, I realized that one report that might be interesting is number of days with highs below freezing and number of days with highs below zero.

Hmmm… let me see what I can whip up quickly…

The winter of 2023/2024 was mildest — only 35 days with highs below freezing. The two winters before it each had 72 such days. The winter of 2020/2021 had only 57 or those but 5 days with highs below zero. The winter of 2013/2014 was nasty.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem this winter is particularly harsh thus far, so my perceptions of a bigger winter may be a memory or perception trick.

So far, January hasn’t been awful either in terms of cold or snow:

Largely due to the annual January Thaw in the early part of the month. (That Thaw might be an interesting thing to do a chart on. 🤔) We just had a cold dip, though, and — as you see — are headed into a deeper one (overnight low last night was -19).

Overall snow depth dropped during the Thaw:

But some recent just-enough-to-have-to-shovel snowfalls happened in the last seven days to bring the level up a little. The cold will make what we have stay.

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It’s not as simple as Theists-Agnostics-Atheists; each has numerous variations. There are, for example, deists and spiritual atheists. As I’ve written about before, a relevant axis is Gnostic-Agnostic: those who claim certainty versus those who don’t. Theists and atheists both believe in a specific kind of universe. They are gnostic to the extent they claim certainty. Agnostics have no certainty.

[For the record, I’d call myself agnostic with deistic leanings and theistic suspicions. I’ve experienced things that make me wonder, and I’m not certain “Let there be Light” isn’t just as viable a theory as the Big Bang. (And by viable I also mean ridiculous.)]

Theism tends to be an inherited idea — inherited parentally, scholastically, or parochially. The major religions have been referred to as extremely persistent “mind viruses”. It is indeed a curious point that the memes of the Abrahamic religions have persisted for so long and “infected” so many.

What I’ve noticed is that many who have “escaped” theism — often some form of Christianity they accepted wholeheartedly — are now staunch atheists. Their belief in an atheistic reality is as strong as their former belief in a theistic one. They did not become agnostic but seem to need some degree of certainty in their metaphysics.

There seems to me a correlation between those who have vehemently switched polarity and those with a bad religious upbringing. Bad in either the poorly done sense or the abusive sense. It compares a bit to how those with a bad math education reject math. I also see a correlation between that bad education (of theism or math) and a lack of deep understanding of what’s being rejected.

Whereas those of us who drifted towards agnosticism seem less to reject one side in favor of the other so much as to see possibilities both ways. And seem to have a better understanding of both sides. To be blunt, many atheists I’ve spoken with vehemently reject their religious past but don’t seem to have actually understood it.

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Last time I mentioned that I’m a bit bemused by people who keep lots of open browser tabs. Some of them apparently leave them open for days or even weeks. The very small part of me that knows how computers work is somehow vaguely horrified by this. The vexing thing is that very same small part of me knows it really doesn’t matter.

I think it may be true I stay sane by channeling my OCD into my work. I’m not a tidy person, quite the opposite, in fact, but as a computer user I am.

Another aspect of this is that, despite the proliferation of icons on many desktops I’ve seen, my desktop looks like this:

Seven icons. That’s it. Two are the Windows icons for the trash and user folder. The PROBE and Net icons involve a network probing app I’ve been running since mid-December to get some data points on network errors I’ve been seeing.

The counts so far:

 720 [Errno 11001   ] getaddrinfo failed
 140 [WinError 10060] Connection failed; no response after timeout
  31 [WinError 10054] Connection forced closed by the remote host
   3 [WinError 10065] Socket operation to an unreachable host
   1 [WinError 10061] Host actively refused connection attempt

I probe every few minutes. There are clusters of errors and days-long periods of no errors at all. I’m not sure whether to blame:

• The new Lenovo laptop (got my eye on you),
• The Wi-Fi or some kind of local radio interference,
• The router/modem (which appears fine),
• The DSL line (which appears fine),
• or general upstream network issues (who knows).

So, it’s kinda down to radio issues, network issues, or my new-ish laptop. That I got a several-days-long period of zero errors makes me think it’s not the laptop.

In any event, normally there’s only five icons on my desktop. One involves the email spam counts I’m keeping:

January is shaping up to have a bumper crop. On my primary email account (which I have for decades), I generally get from 8 to 13 spam emails every day:

Both of the days with 29 spam emails happened this month!

Another desktop icon involves Windows Registry tweaks I’ve picked up along the way and need to refer back to if I want to undo them or have to redo them after something cleans my slate. That one really doesn’t need to be on the desktop anymore. I had it there for quick access while I was trying to debug why Windows reverted to Dark Mode every time I rebooted.

Turned out to be a Lenovo utility pointed to by a Registry entry. Deleted it, and no more Dark Mode.

But I’ve seen people whose entire desktop is filled with icons. I don’t understand how they find anything. (Likewise, those who keep all their documents in just the Documents folder. How do they find anything? Perhaps that’s why Windows Search is more of a big deal for others? I hardly ever use it.)

I had a grandma who lived by the aphorism: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” That is certainly how I’ve managed my computers. (My personal life is a lot messier, though. 😏)

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Got some new memes:

Which in HTML says: “end of trump”.

We can only hope the midterms make a dent and start to turn things around. The rest of the world is starting to push back more. Shameful how America’s example of democracy has been tarnished, perhaps irreparably.

He puts his name on everything, so why not:

But I have a growing sense of what’s-the-point. In the current culture war, we seem to have reached the point where there’s little more to be said. Really, now it’s just venting (which, according to some studies, can in moderation be mentally helpful). Words now only signal our allegiance or attack our opponents — no one is persuaded; we’re too polarized.

That said, the transgressive nature of the current administration in contrast to our long-espoused American and Christian values cannot help but be polarizing. (It seems indicative that a once-common universal epitome of transgressive behavior was child molestation.)

Unfortunately, we seem to have come to the end of a decade-long unraveling of the social rope. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

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Here’s a much nicer meme:

I can’t take credit for the idea. It came from this reply to a Substack Note I posted about the proverbial half-full-half-empty glass. I just made the image. Great idea, though! Definitely in the “wish I’d thought of it” category.

I won’t explain it here, but this post might help.

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That time in high school biology glass where we had to do a finger prick to draw a drop of our blood to type. My internal self-defense system refused to allow me to stab myself, so I had to have the teacher stick me.

Of course, back then nobody bothered with wearing gloves.

I really do believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or put better, what tests you, grows you. That’s why I’ve never bothered with hand sanitizer or taken small wounds too seriously (when you work with your hands, those happen a lot).

That said, since I regularized washing my hands before eating, I’ve haven’t experienced any bouts of “one-day flu”. (There’s no such thing as a 24-hour “bug” — it’s invariably a bout of food poisoning, often from something unwashed.)

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In the Modular Curve Stitching post last December, I showed diagrams I’d made. I later found out there is a website that lets you create your own, and it has some interesting features.

For one, the stitches run between two circles separated on the Z-axis, and you can rotate the image to see both and the stitches between them:

It also uses color which I hadn’t implemented. I used it to make one of the more interesting diagrams from the post:

It has a number of different color modes, too. I’m going to steal the ideas for my own Python version!

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What is it with screws? I had a pair of eyeglasses in which one of the hinge screws constantly worked loose. I had to carry a tiny screwdriver in my wallet.

On my home office chair, the lower right-hand armrest bolt (just a big screw) constantly works itself loose. I just now had to give it almost a full turn to tighten it.

The left-hand armrest bolts, or the upper right-hand armrest bolt, no problem.

So, what is it about screws?

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I’ve noted before how the publication date of my Friday Notes posts is noticeably biased towards the latter half of the month:

Mostly because I don’t start thinking about it until the month begins. This post adds one more to the column for the 23rd. To the point here, I noticed a gap on the 15th and determined to plug it.

Turns out I only get one shot at it this year: May 15th.

And, by the way, I really love Python:

I mean, I could look at a calendar and check the 15th in each month, but it’s ever so much more fun to whip up some code that generalizes the problem to any day of the month (DOTM) falling on any day of the week (DOTW) for any year.

It makes it trivial to know, for instance, that Friday the 13th this year comes in February, March, and November.

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

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