Laptop, Take 3

Friends and regular readers (all three of you) know about my struggles with the Dell XPS 15 laptop I bought in 2019 to replace my Sony Vaio laptop. After access to work machines since the 1980s, that Sony was the first laptop I had to buy in retirement.

It had its issues, but was great compared to the Dell, which, in retrospect, was a lemon from the start. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how broken its wireless system was until after the warranty period. Twice I found a way to improve things to usable, but recently it returned to unusable. And then wouldn’t boot at all.

So I went and bought an HP Envy laptop.

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VanderMeer: Annihilation

I originally planned this Sci-Fi Saturday post as a positive review of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, but Burns really nailed it about plans “gang aft agley.” I’ll tell you right now I bailed about halfway through the second book because I wasn’t enjoying the read, was utterly bored by the story, and had found VanderMeer’s writing style annoying from the beginning.

So this isn’t a positive review, but I’m willing to credit much of the lack of connection on my taste, both with regard to content and to writing style. The author and the trilogy are held in high regard, and I don’t at all dispute the quality of the storytelling. It’s just not for me.

His Wiki page says he’s compared to Borges and Kafka (which seems apt), and I’ve never cared that much for their writing, either.

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Winter Has Arrived

I get a kick from the patterns of life. They don’t always mean anything, but they can be fun to notice. For example, nine years ago I posted Instant Winter, which, among other things celebrates the tiny (meaningless) pattern of the date that day: 12-12-12 (You can arrange the year-month-day any which way you like!) Nine years later, it’s December 12th again, but the year is backwards: 12-12-21

12-12-21 after much shoveling. It was up to 3 feet in places!

That post also celebrated, as its name says, the sudden arrival of winter (late as usual these days). And per that, it arrived late again this year, but when it finally did show up it, came in with a bang (I don’t know about lions in March, but December seems to roar).

11-25-21 and not a drop of snow in sight!

It didn’t come anywhere close to snowing for Halloween, and there wasn’t a flake in sight for Thanksgiving, but it seems certain we’ll have a ton of the stuff for Christmas! Winter and snow cause all sorts of small issues, but many years of conditioning have linked snow and Christmas for me.

12-7-21 It always starts so softly and innocently…

Time to break out the shovels!

§

In other news, I’ve been reading books and watching TV shows, and I’d love to tell you about them, but I’ve already gone on long enough for one post.

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


Zer0s and Burning Roses

I’ve been a voracious reader all my life, and as much as my college career pointed towards one in movies or TV, I’ve always ranked books as vastly superior. Put it this way: Although I once presumed (and still do) to be worthy of making TV shows or movies, I’ve never felt skilled enough — or driven enough — to write fiction.

Which no doubt contributes to my admiration and appreciation of those who can pull me into their fictional world and entertain, educate, or enlighten me with only their words (no score, no images, no editing).

Last week I read Zer0s (2015), by Chuck Wendig, and Burning Roses (2020), by S.L. Huang, and thoroughly enjoyed both. In fact, I gulped down both of these fast-paced (and very different) adventures in single sittings. Both would make pretty good movies, too.

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Entropy 102

Last time I began explaining my “CD collection” analogy for entropy; here I’ll pick up where I left off (and hopefully finish — I seem to be writing a lot of trilogies these days). There’s more to say about macro-states, and I want also to get into the idea of indexing.

I make no claims for creativity with this analogy. It’s just a concrete instance of the mathematical abstraction of a totally sorted list (with no duplicates). A box of numbered index cards would work just as well. There are myriad parallel examples.

One goal here is to link the abstraction with reality.

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Entropy 101

Entropy is a big topic, both in science and in the popular gestalt. I wrote about it in one of my very first blog posts here, back in 2011. I’ve written about it a number of other times since. Yet, despite mentioning it in posts and comments, I’ve never laid out the CD collection analogy from that 2011 post in full detail.

Recent discussions suggest I should. When I mentioned entropy in a post most recently, I made the observation that its definition has itself suffered entropy. It has become more diffuse. There are many views of what entropy means, and some, I feel, get away from the fundamentals.

The CD collection analogy, though, focuses on only the fundamentals.

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My Old Top Ten

Recently I read a blog post that discussed those “ten ways to do X” lists (which raises a question of how many things even have ten reasonable ways of doing them). It reminded me of a blogger I knew when I first started here who had a blog that only posted lists of ten things. And that reminded me of David Letterman’s Top Ten lists.

Which led to remembering my own Top Ten Things in Life list from many years back (30, at least). Since this blog is, in part, my scrawl in the internet wall, I realized it’s exactly the sort of thing I should document here.

I thought I’d also toss in a bunch of other favorites to fill out the post.

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Back to Kilauea

It’s no secret; I’m hard to impress. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been places, learned stuff, bought the tee-shirts. I’m not willfully hard to impress; I don’t resist being impressed. It’s just that after all these years it takes something genuinely impressive.

Like volcanoes. They’re impressive. Something about lava really grabs me. Rock running like molasses; I want to play in it. Yet somehow there is only one volcano in my heart: Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I’m so impressed I did two Wednesday Wow posts about it.

And this baby makes three…

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Friday Notes (Nov 19, 2021)

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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WP: Classic Editor vs Reader

The post’s title has more the sense of Ali vs Foreman than of Coke vs Pepsi. True, both are contests, but the the latter is a selection — the former is a fight. This post is about a major problem some posts created using the Classic Editor have when displayed in the WordPress Reader.

Specifically, breaks between paragraphs are lost. In some cases an entire post becomes one long paragraph. The only breaks come from the various HTML block elements that force paragraph breaks. (Things like horizontal rules, large images, or tables.)

Here I’ll explain what’s going on and how to get your paragraphs back.

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