tcpip | Reading

... but I'm sending all the good-luck thoughts I can to those in Jamaica.

Hurricane Melissa is now in the top five strongest storms ever in the Atlantic, with central pressure at 896mb and sustained winds over 180, with a record measured gust of 241mph.

This is basically an F-4 tornado many miles wide surrounded by F-3 tornado winds for a long, long ways. It will be dumping more than five FEET of rain on some parts of Jamaica over the next couple days.

leecetheartist

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Current Mood: calm

bobquasit

Not completely, if you're reading this. But Mastodon (where I've been doing most of my posting) is down. So are some other sites. I wonder why?

Current Mood: curious

silver_chipmunk

Got up at 10:00 today and had breakfast and coffee. Then puttered online and wrote a little bit more in the story I'm working on.

Finally at 1:00 I showered and dressed, and then killed time online until 2:00 when I left for my 3:00 appointment with the eye surgeon. I got there early of course, but not all that early. They checked me out pretty thoroughly, and the result is that I've healed fine, my vision is excellent now, and, thankfully, my eye pressure is too. I always worry about that because Dad had glaucoma.

They had a box of chocolate bars for raising money for Archangel Michael Church Greek School, and I of course bought a bar with almonds, because how could I resist chocolate for the Archangel Michael? It's really good chocolate too.

Anyway, I have another appointment in six months. I think they want to keep tabs on me until my right eye deteriorates enough to need cataract surgery too. I hope that's a long time coming.

So I caught the 12 bus back to Flushing and went to Duane Reade to pick up prescriptions, and to get some lubricating eye drops, since the doctor said I should use some. Then I went to meet up with

mashfanficchick and go shopping.

We met in Starbucks. I got my usual pumpkin spice latte while I was waiting for zer. Then we took the bus to BJ's and went shopping for stuff there. I got some chips to bring on Halloween, and some mushroom cream pasta bowls for me.

The Kid called while I was there and we talked for awhile. Nothing new.

Then we took a Lyft to the mall where Costco is, and also went to Aldi, where I got some shower gel, and Petco where I got turtle food, but not the brand I always get. They were out of the Tetra Repto Min, and I had to get something else. I hope Christie likes it.

At Costco I didn't get anything. It was almost 9:00 by the time we finished.

mashfanficchick saw me to the bus stop for the 88 bus, which I took to Main Street and the 44 home from there.

Didn't Team the FWiB because he has a power failure at his place. He called me while I was on the 12 bus to tell me, I got that call and was able to talk to him, but then he called again while I was on the bus to BJs, which I didn't hear. He left a message that they said the power wouldn't be back til 1:00 am, so we wouldn't be able to Team at all today. Bummer.

Oh, on the more cheerful side, I got an answer to the email I sent to Frank C. That's nice. I have to answer him tomorrow.

Anyway, I got home a bit after 9:30, and had dinner. By the time I finished it was pet feeding time. I fed the pets, Christie still had two days worth of her regular food left, so I won't know what she thinks of the new stuff til Wednesday.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. The Kid.

3. Good report from the eye surgeon.

4. Got shower stuff.

5. Got turtle food.

6.

mashfanficchick

Current Mood: cheerful

abomvubuso

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: cape town
Current Music: Battle Beast - Black Ninja

dorchadas

Tonight is another meeting of my book group, which at this point has been running for twelve years at this point.

We're a bit inconsistent, since in twelve years we've read 59 books, but we have read at least one book every single year. Some of them were excellent, like Bunnicula, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, The Devil in the White City, or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and some of them were garbage, like Anno Dracula, The Secret, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, or Supernova Era. We've read fiction and nonfiction, history and biography and science and political analysis, fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction and drama, classics and books written within the last year, and all kinds of things in between. People have joined and left but the core group remains.

redpikachu started it as a way to read more books and it's worked, at least for the books we've read.

We spend a lot of time also just talking about our lives, but I'm heartened after reading that Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing. Other than the wine on Shabbat, most of the drinking I do at all is when I pour a glass of wine, sit down at my computer, and fire up a Discord video chat. And I just remembered that we used to do Google Hangouts back when that was a realistic video call solution.

Here's to many more years.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Nothing

leecetheartist

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tcpip

Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: The Rookery

silver_chipmunk

Last night I read the new Penric and Desdemona novella on my Nook, the whole thing. It's 114 pages. I was up til 3:45 and then I turned out the light and slept til 12:30. It was very good, as good as the rest of the series, but rather melancholy.

I got up, had breakfast and coffee and went to the Starsky and Hutch Creative Work Session, and chatted. Had a very good time, and got some writing done, a new story for Halloween, not the Advent Calendar.

We chatted til about 6:00, and then ended. I heated up the leftover garlic naan from the Indian food we had on Thursday. Then at 7:00 I Teamed the FWiB.

We talked til 8:30, when we ended, and I called Middle Brother. He's fine, nothing new, Of course he's looking forward to Halloween.

Then I had dinner, and called the Kid, who of course didn't pick up.

I puttered on my phone in bed, mostly playing solitaire, and then got up to feed the pets. I did that and then started here. And that's all.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. The new Bujold novella.

3. The Starsky and Hutch fandom.

4. Did some writing.

5. Middle Brother is well,

6. Halloween is coming soon!

Current Mood: cheerful

sweetsorcery

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fred_mouse

In the interest of accountability: yes, I have worked on Eldest's quilt. Previously I was at the point of needing some more blanks drawn (done), and then 20 blocks needed sewing and then assembling. The goal was to do 2 per weekend and then assemble over a few weeks.

However! After two weekends, I have 5 blocks sewn, and one nearly done, being thus a block (and a half) ahead). I have also assembled the first four into a two by two block thus having got ahead on the assembling. Thus, I am feeling tentatively confident about minimum goal: finish top by the end of the year.

I've also attempted to progress Youngest's. Sadly, while I know I had an image that they wanted to have converted, I have not found where I filed it. That is not a this week problem though. I have only progressed Middlest's by dint of sending them another reminder that they need to actually decide on a pattern.

Other than that my craft has near stalled. I have started back on the playing the Hanon's, but only a few pieces every few days, and only the first set of 20, on loop. It does help my hands when I do, but also, I'm struggling to find the motivation.

Reading wise, I have simplified my life down to seven currently reading, mostly because Storygraph added the 'pause' option, which adequately reflects how I feel about a lot of books. One of my thoughts about the last week of the year is to set myself a goal of finishing or abandoning one book per day. Which won't be that hard, as there are several I had put somewhere sensible I found today which are all past half read. In terms of reading goals, the number of works is past the goal, because I started tracking online short fiction (if it were already there) which I kind of wish I could separate out. I'm not anywhere near the number of pages goal, but I also haven't been tracking where I'm up to, so it might be that when I sit down and capture where I'm up to I'll be much further. Whether I get there or not isn't an issue -- I've been doing a lot of academic reading and really haven't had the time/energy for fun reading.

I had another thought when I started the last paragraph, that was more than just the 'where are the two reading goals' but eh, I've forgotten (possibly: tidy the library. or do the next pass through of the library check, given that Librarything has a better way of doing it than I've previously found).

leecetheartist

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Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: Cloud Cuckooland
Current Music: Chirpy Chirpy Cheep

silver_chipmunk

Got a good nights sleep last night so I feel much better. I did get to sleep somewhat later than I would have hoped because the new Lois McMaster Bujold Penric and Desdemona novella dropped on Barnes and Noble so I was able to download it to my Nook. So I did that before I slept. But I did resist the temptation to start reading it.

Anyway, I got up at 9"00 feeling much better and had breakfast and coffee. I showered and dressed and took the 16 bus to Bowne Park, because the church we meet in now is being used for early voting, so we had to meet in the park where we used to before we got the church. I got there quite early, but G was already there so we sat on a bench together.

The meeting was unusually heavy and deep. But it was good. Afterward I got a ride fro S to the diner.

I took the bus home, and dropped into the Starsky and Hutch chat. I didn't stay long though because I texted

mashfanficchick to ask about having dinner with Elyssa, and ze said if I wanted to join them I should come right over. So I said goodbye in the chat and took the 44 bus to Flushing where I discovered what I should have remembered, that the 7 train isn't running between Main St and Mets/Willets Point. Instead there's a shuttle bus. So that took extra time.

But I got to

mashfanficchick's before Elyssa got there, and hung out until she did. Then we went and picked up Liz G who was coming too.

By weird coincidence they settled on having dinner at the same diner we go to after my meetings. I had a regular dinner though, the brandy rigatoni. We had a good time talking and then Elissa drove us all home.

I Teamed the FWiB for a short time, a little over half an hour, and then I got a text from

mashfanficchick to give zer a call, so I did and we made some plans for Monday.

Then I started here, and soon I'm going to bed to read my Penric and Desdemona.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. My meetings and the people there.

3. Nice weather so it was comfortable in the park.

4. Got a little time in the Starsky and Hutch chat.

5. Dinner out with friends.

6. New Penric and Desdemona novella.

Current Mood: cheerful

leecetheartist

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Current Mood: nerdy
Current Location: Upper Middle Earth
Current Music: Journey of the Sorceror

the_siobhan

The Good:
I went to a wedding last weekend. It was tiny, less than 10 people at City Hall and it was genuinely the only time in my life I've ever teared up at a wedding. The couple are just so amazing together. They could barely let go of each others' hands long enough to put on their rings.

The Bad:
I dropped my Kobo somewhere on the subway. So far the lost-and-found hasn't turned it up yet. That is so annoying and I only have myself to blame.

(I seem to have lost a lot of stuff lately in inexplicable ways. An adapter cable I took with me to Montreal that NEVER LEFT MY KNAPSACK apparently no longer exists. I dropped the tennis ball I roll under my foot today and there is no POSSIBLE way it ended up anywhere except on the floor - but it's not on the floor. How? Is there a portal in this room leading to another dimension? And if yes, is it big enough for me to climb into it?)

The Ugly:
So house stuff, hoo boy. I texted the contractor every single day since my last post. Crickets. Messenger indicates that texts have been read, but no response. I reached out to the city and they tell me I have to hire my own engineer to create a new report. This may involve tearing up the floor to get at the foundations. I say fuck. A lot.

I have hired a guy who has experience sorting out difficult permits because apparently this kind of shit is common enough that you can make a living fixing it for people. So far I am tentatively hopeful - he's been working in this part of town long enough that he knows all the inspectors and can talk to them directly about what needs to happen - this project has been going on for so long that the original inspector assigned to the permit has retired, but dude has his cell number. Fingers crossed he can figure this out. He ALSO called the contractor and didn't get a response - so at this point I'm pretty sure no inspections were done at all and the engineer is just hoping that if he doesn't admit it they won't get in trouble. I have already reached out to the provincial licensing board.

So that nonsense sucked up a lot of the time I had planned to use for finishing up in the house, but I think I still managed to get a lot done. Four big bags of unwanted clothes got walked to a drop-in centre today. A bunch of little fiddly things got repaired, more boxes of stuff have been unearthed and I think I may have actually finally managed to unpack everything that was stored in the house and shed. Two boxes of unwanted stuff was offered to neighbours and taken away. I found more of ex-housemate's LARP gear, they want it so that has been packed up in a box with their name on it. Most everything I pulled out this week was covered in inches of dust so I have been working an assembly line through the shower room to clean everything before it gets put away or boxed up for donation. I have filled the recycling bin twice and the stack of re-usable cardboard on the front porch continues to grow.

***

A friend recommended their physiotherapist, who just happens to be around the corner from me, so I made an appointment to have her look at my foot. She gave me some exercises. She also did some massage that had me going, OK WOW I did not know that specific spot was made out of pain and weeping, but apparently it is. I was sore in whole new places that night, but today I walked to the drop-in centre without my cane because I had too much to carry, and I did not regret that choice when I got home - so maybe that's a good sign? Anyway, going back tomorrow.

***

Tomorrow I go back to work. I want to put one last coat of paint on the doors so I'll try and squeeze that in. Sunday I'm taking my dad for his boosters. Then it's three more weeks of picking at things and hopefully good news about the permits. I have another week off booked in November and if all goes well I'll get to use it for emptying the storage locker. Then that's a $250/month expense that goes away.

Fingers crossed

conuly

Since I belong to a little bitty credit union, my branch is closed tomorrow and I have to go into the city to get a replacement and, while I'm there, have them fix my name - if they remove my middle initial from my card, my last name will fit properly, easy-peasy. Or I can wait until Monday, since I'm certain I lost it in the house, but it turns out there's another protest tomorrow so I may as well go in.

Anyway, speaking of protests and politics and food banks,

petra is offering up fanworks:

If you donate at least $25 in cash or in-kind to a food bank at any point between now and the end of the Trump Administration, and you either share a fandom of mine and want a drabble or fannish poetry, or you want original poetry, drop me a comment, and I will write for you.

So, there you go, that's a win-win for everybody.

Edit: Well! As you might expect, as soon as I posted I happened to roll my chair over my card! It's fine, chair and card are both fine. I still need to make them fix my name, but it can wait.

conuly

This is the last mending they'll take, and I'm not sure how long it'll hold. I've ordered a new pair, and on the one hand I know $100 is cheap - especially for my prescription! - but on the other hand, I didn't want to spend it. And I didn't exactly love my choice of frames, either, but they were inexpensive and fit my pupil distance, so I'll live with them.

(Though, looking on the website, it seems glow in the dark frames are an option!? I would never, sounds like a real visual annoyance, but man, so much respect for anybody who goes in that direction!)

*********************

( Read more... )

silver_chipmunk

I turned off the light last night at 1:45 am. I assumed since it was so late I'd fall asleep quickly. I did not. I did not fall asleep at all.

Finally at 7:30, after literally being awake all night, I got up, had breakfast, and went back to bed and slept til 12:30. That was not enough sleep. But I got through the day.

I had coffee, and put in a Shipt order. Then I took a shower and dressed. The Shipt order actually came early, which was a nice surprise.

I put it away and puttered online. At 4:00 I went to the bedroom and lay down and played on my phone til 5:00 when I got up and went to my Al-anon meeting in the Bronx. As usual I had pizza first.

The meeting was rather small but quite good. M drove me to the bus stop afterward.

Then my battles with the MTA began. The 50 bus was about 15 minutes late. It finally arrived, and I got to 31st and Linden to wait for the 25, and found there wasn't on for almost half an hour. So I did what I did last week and walked home from there. Grrr,

Got home finally and Teamed the FWiB. We couldn't talk as long as I would have liked cause it was so late but we it was good.

Then I fed the pets and started here. I need to get to bed soon, my head is bussing I'm so tired.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. My meetings and the people there.

3. Pizza.

4. Held myself to only two donuts this week.

5. Shipt.

6. Bed soon!

Current Mood: tired

hmmm_tea

For quite a while I hit a brick wall with my 2x Great Grandfather Samuel Barritt as he wasn't with his wife and children in Cardiff on any of the censuses. His marriage and children's birth certificates indicated he was a merchant seaman, which at least explained his absence, but didn't give much to go on for finding any more about him.

Crew lists for the 19th century are mostly not transcribed, so short of finding all the remaining ones and checking them it's not easy to find merchant sailors unless they happen to appear on one of the ones that has been...

( An ancestor found )

Current Mood: curious

leecetheartist

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Current Mood: tired

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October 2025

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Page Summary

seawasp - I don't pray...
leecetheartist - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 28. Bridge of Stars
bobquasit - Is the Internet down?
silver_chipmunk - Eye surgeon and shopping
abomvubuso - Battle Beast - Black Ninja
dorchadas - Book group
leecetheartist - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 27. Fire
tcpip - Supercomputing and Affirmation
silver_chipmunk - Starsky and Hutch chat
sweetsorcery - FIC "Biggles and the Bloom of Ecstasy" Biggles/EvS (Biggles Series) E
fred_mouse - Project progress
leecetheartist - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 26. Noisy
silver_chipmunk - Meeting and dinner out
leecetheartist - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 25. Map
the_siobhan - swallow poison, swallow sugar
conuly - And, huh. It looks like I lost my bank card
conuly - Welp, my glasses have reached the point of no return with superglue
silver_chipmunk - Horrible insomnia
hmmm_tea - A Sailor Found and Then Lost Again
leecetheartist - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 24. Forgotten Things

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Page generated Oct. 28th, 2025 11:56 pm

Lev Lafayette's journal

Reading

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I don't pray...

Drawtober 2025 Prompt 28. Bridge of Stars

Is the Internet down?

Eye surgeon and shopping

Battle Beast - Black Ninja

Book group

Drawtober 2025 Prompt 27. Fire

Supercomputing and Affirmation

Starsky and Hutch chat

FIC "Biggles and the Bloom of Ecstasy" Biggles/EvS (Biggles Series) E

Project progress

Drawtober 2025 Prompt 26. Noisy

Meeting and dinner out

Drawtober 2025 Prompt 25. Map

swallow poison, swallow sugar

And, huh. It looks like I lost my bank card

Welp, my glasses have reached the point of no return with superglue

Horrible insomnia

A Sailor Found and Then Lost Again

Drawtober 2025 Prompt 24. Forgotten Things

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October 2025

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