Category Archives: Friday Notes
Not that anyone should care, but it’s Friday the 13th today! More to the point, it’s Friday, and I’ve been remiss about Friday Notes this year. The one last January is the only one I’ve posted so far. Big part of that is having, at long last, reduced my note pile enough that I don’t feel so (word) pressed.
Some of it is the ongoing problem of ennui. The eleven-year blog anniversary is approaching, and that tends to ignite old questions about why I bother to do this. By now I’ve left some sort of small scrawl on the internet wall and explored many of the topics that drove me to blogging.
On the other hand, the pile isn’t by any means gone, so let’s get to it…
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17 Comments | tags: Discworld, James Webb Space Telescope, Jerry Seinfeld, JWST, Seinfeld, tesseract | posted in Friday Notes
It’s been a minute or two since my last post. In large part, I’ve been on a three-week coding binge, moving some projects along and doing improvements and minor bug fixes on library code. At this point I’m a bit burned out and definitely over the binge. I don’t get the mood to really tuck in like this much anymore, so when that mood does strike, I surrender to it.
One consequence of not posting is that the longer I’m away from it the harder it seems to start up again. Some part of me finds this unrewarding and unsatisfying, but another part of me enjoys the writing and is drawn to it. Also, I still struggle with maintaining an artificial politeness rather than unleashing my inner guido (and I’m so tempted some days).
Anyway, without further ado, another edition of Friday Notes.
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22 Comments | tags: derivatives, James Webb Space Telescope, JWST | posted in Friday Notes
Welcome to a special edition of Friday Notes. This isn’t just the end of the week or even just of the month (although both are true). It’s also the end of the year!
So this edition of Notes is a reflection on a kind of weird year.
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17 Comments | tags: 2021, Agatha Christie, blogger, Chillaxmas, dogs, Octavia E. Butler | posted in Books, Friday Notes
It’s time for another edition of Friday Notes, a dump of miscellaneous bits and ends. (Or do I mean odds and pieces? Odd bits and end pieces? Whatever. Stuff that doesn’t rate a blog post on its own, so it gets roped into a package deal along with other stray thoughts that wandered by.)
There’s no theme this time, the notes are pretty random. Past editions have picked the low-hanging fruit, and the pace has slowed. I’ve managed to whittle away a good bit of the pile.
Maybe some day no more notes and my blog will be totally in real time!
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56 Comments | tags: calculator, deer, El Coyote, entropy, graphs, margarita | posted in Friday Notes
I skipped Friday Notes last month, and almost skipped it this month. To some extent that’s due to the note pile getting smaller, but the larger share of it is the exhaustion and ennui I’ve been feeling all year. My posts-per-month count has been noticeably down since April.
Over the 110 months of this blog (which doesn’t count 2017, the year I took off), the average is 10 posts per month, but in the previous two years it’s 14, so I do seem off my feed lately. OTOH, only 74 posts in 2018 (my lowest year), and I’m at 96 now, so there’s that.
In any event, here’s another edition of FN.
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13 Comments | tags: 2048, Octavia E. Butler, time, time travel, touchscreen | posted in Friday Notes
It’s finally a Friday which means there’s a probability of weather occurring as well as lesser probability of another Friday Notes post. A quick roll of my free-will dice, and it turns out today I’ve got both weather and a post. (Because I have notes. There are always notes.)
In this bundle I’ve got a “so this just happened” rant, a scam warning, a funny story about people, a question, and a couple of callbacks to a couple of favorite previous topics. I might toss in a few other items once I get going and if space permits.
Because I have notes. There are always notes.
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5 Comments | tags: Domain Registry, Paul Halpern, scam artists, Walmart | posted in Friday Notes
It’s time for another edition of Friday Notes, my chance to whittle away a bit more at my collection of half-baked notions and blog post ideas. I recently noticed yet another notebook I’d forgotten about, so the pile actually got bigger this week rather than smaller. I’m starting to feel like Sisyphus.
The real problem is that, when you come down to it, it’s hopeless. I’m always going to be coming up with more ideas than I can write about, so the pile is always going to grow. What I need is the AI technology to clone my brain so I could delegate and distribute. Write in parallel!
But for now, all I can do is whittle away.
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5 Comments | tags: Minnesota, The Mitchells vs the Machines | posted in Friday Notes
My serious effort lately to reduce my pile of notes has resulted in picking the low-hanging fruit and leaving the ones that demand more effort. (One reason those notes have been notes all this time is not feeling the effort needed to develop them into something.)
The good news is that I’ve dug through most of the new layer — the one that formed when I started blogging again after taking a break all through 2017 (being in shock from 2016). Now I’m tapping into the older much larger — and in many cases now outdated — pile from before 2017. (Notes about politics in 2016 I can now just toss.)
Three of today’s notes are from that old pile. Three obviously aren’t.
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11 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, MN Twins, time, Twins 2021 | posted in Friday Notes
It’s that time again — Friday Notes time — where the flotsam and jetsam that have washed up on the shores of my mind get their brief moment in the spotlight and then recede down the river of time to be lost in the ocean of the past. (If that isn’t a tortured metaphor, I don’t know what one is.)
There’s no theme this time, unless “random bits” is a theme. There’s a thing about very surprised wasp, an upside down beer can, a computer fix that’s worked out, a freedom from loathsome ads, and the light at the end of the tunnel. Also a relevant and favorite quote.
As I said, random bits.
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12 Comments | tags: Apple News, craft beer, Dell XPS 15, Google, news, Stone Brewing | posted in Friday Notes
Time for another round of notes — bits and pieces too small for a post and which, for whatever reason, don’t seem likely to ever grow into a post (or even a Brain Bubble con carne). Best of all, from the perspective of many readers, not one single shred of math or contentious ideas!
These notes posts generally have an undercurrent of “spring cleaning” — the whole idea is to help reduce my ever-growing pile of scraps of paper with half-baked ideas. Actual spring cleaning is upon us, so I’m even more vested in seeing how much I can clear away. I even have some notes devoted to the very idea itself.
So without further ado…
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14 Comments | tags: A Christmas Carol, Archer (TV series), Little Big Town, Little Feat, Paul Beatty, Steve Martin, William Shatner | posted in Friday Notes
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