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Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

[twenty twenty-four day forty-seven]: two of two

Published February 16, 2024 by centaur
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Back when I worked on-site, I used to keep a lot of genre toys on my desk - Oreius the centaur, a plush Cthulhu, a Star Trek Enterprise I used as a fidget - and I told myself that I was doing so to remind myself why I was working: not just to pay for food, clothing and shelter, but to pay for fun and entertainment.

But I had too much stuff, too poorly organized, to the point that I didn't want to come home and spend time in my own library. It got ridiculous at one point. My wife and I talked about it and I took on the big project of turning the library into something that I could REALLY use, from organized files to library style aisles.

But also, it meant having a place for everything. If I was to own the genre toys, if I was to keep them, I needed to SEE them, not just store them, and, ideally, have them be a part of my day-to-day life. This meant crafting a space, and, ultimately, building custom structures which enabled the toys to go on display. This became even more urgent in the pandemic, where we built out a lot of structure to enable us to put almost EVERYTHING on display, down to Porsche's scythe hanging over my desk.

But, as I said before, after we moved away from the drought and the fires and the burning, we left the swords lying around and the hardware to hang them in the metaphorical junk drawer. It's easy to put self-care chores like this on the back burner, as they are not "urgent". And they're not even really "important", in the grander scheme of things. But they are fulfilling, on two levels: first, in that they make your environment nicer; and second, in that they involve making and building things, which is an accomplishment of its own.

Well, now, we have assembled the things that we made to make Excalibur and Kylo Ren's lightsaber an integral part of my environment. They are no longer easily visible behind me when I'm on Meet or Zoom, but they are at last up on display again. And one more piece of the library falls into place.

All I need now is to find the jade monkey, roadmaps and ice scraper before the next full moon ...

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-six]: so conveeenient

Published February 15, 2024 by centaur
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I do like the fact that Loki is spending more time in the library (especially while my wife is gone on a business trip, so he's been getting less attention due to having fewer attendants) but I sure hope that none of the things on my whiteboard desk were important TODOs, because they're TOSMEARS now.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-five]: level but not even

Published February 14, 2024 by centaur
centaur 1

So back in the day (and on the Left Coast) I had a couple of swords mounted on my bookcases. We hadn't done that here because we were busy ... but two years is too long to be busy, so my wife and I decided it was time to set up the swords again, starting with the Kylo "Kylo Ren is Best Sith" Ren cross-lightsaber.

Only ... it ain't that simple. We had to buy new brackets as the previous ones disappeared in the move. We found those at Lowe's, but it turned out that we could not install the mounting diamonds as the old bookcases were solid wood and these were hollow - the screws would have pulled straight out.

Eventually we used bolts and washers and I was able to finish the installation after my wife left town.

A little duct tape and an old Amazon delivery bag protect the books in the case. There's only one problem:

Despite our careful measuring, it was not possible to make it both level (up-and-down) and even (side-to-side) at the same time. It may be that the bookcase itself is leaning (see the top of the previous picture) and since it is screwed into the bookcase next to it for stability, well, we're stuck with that.

Still, I like how it came out.

1 of 2. Next: Excalibur.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-four]: i can’t drive fifty-five

Published February 13, 2024 by centaur
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I and a politically opposite friend got together today to NOT solve the world's problems, and after a long and charged discussion we came to the conclusion ...

... that the 55+ menu at IHOP is good.

I think we can come together as a nation on this one.

Seriously, just turned 55 recently, and my buddy offered to take me out to breakfast at IHOP and order off the "senior" menu because, well ... sigh. It's time, literally, it's time. And it was pretty good!

So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

"What's that, sonny? First time trying it? I can't hear you over my advancing decrepitude ... "

-the Centaur @ 55(ish, give or take a few days)

[twenty twenty-four day forty-two]: a new life on the off-world colonies

Published February 11, 2024 by centaur
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This is your periodic reminder that we may not be on the moon, but we live in a pretty awesome world, where almost every movie, book or comic book you ever wanted is either available to stream over the air or can be readily shipped to your home, genre toys that once were inaccessible are now readily available, and we can shrink a playable Galaga machine down to the size you can put it on your coffee table.

We've got it good. Don't screw it up.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-one]: squirrel

Published February 10, 2024 by centaur
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der interwebs is kaput

Mt internet has been flakey, so I chatted with an AT-AT Druid online about it and they unexpectedly had a free repair tech slot the next morning. Send them? Yeah baby yeah!

After some kerfuffle with the confirmation, we got it scheduled and they showed up at 830 this morning only to find ...

The internet box half ripped off the house and the beginnings of what looked like a squirrel's nest in it.

Remember, folks, step one of network debugging is to check layer one of the stack: your physical equipment. "Your wires are loose" is the network equivalent of "Ain't got no gas in it" from Sling Blade.

So, hopefully, regular blogging will resume soon. Till then, enjoy this lovely blog post thumb-crafted on my phone.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty]: minimalist but persistent

Published February 9, 2024 by centaur
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Sometimes when I'm behind I shoot for a relatively minimal breakfast: a grapefruit or half pummelo, some toast, maybe some grits or vegan yogurt. I enjoy breakfast, even though I don't generally eat a full three meals a day: for some reason, since I've been out on my own, I've gravitated to two full meals (brunch and dinner) and the occasional midnight snack of milk and pound cake if I'm not too full.

But the "read and eat" ritual remains important, whether I do it two or three times a day. Unless I'm eating with others, or am in the middle of some absolute emergency, I always have a book with me when I eat --- to the point that I have a stand set up to read at the breakfast table. The current top-of-the-stack books are "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" for the late-night reads and "Unmasking Autism" for the daily reader (along with "GANs in Action" for a project at work, and various books for writing reference).

Even if your meals are quick and minimal, you can read a few paragraphs while you eat, and hopefully enjoy it. And, if you're persistent, you can get through enormous books this way ... like "A New Kind of Science" or "Machine Vision" or "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", three long books that I ate, one bite at a time, mostly over breakfast and midnight snacks, a page or even a paragraph at a time, until, at long last, one more mountain was climbed.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Half a pummelo, two slices of toast, and "Unmasking Autism".

[twenty twenty-four day thirty-nine]: space cadet crashes to earth

Published February 8, 2024 by centaur
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When you've got a lot to do, sometimes it's tempting to just "power through it" - for example, by extending a meeting time until all the agenda items are handled. But this is just another instance of what's called "hero programming" in the software world, and while sometimes it's necessary (say, the day of a launch) it isn't a sustainable long-term strategy, and will incur debts that you can't easily repay.

Case in point, for the Neurodiversiverse Anthology, my coeditor and I burned up our normally scheduled meeting discussing, um, scheduling with the broader Thinking Ink team, so we added a spot meeting to catch up. We finalized the author and artist contracts, we developed guidance for the acceptance and rejection letters, and did a whole bunch of other things. It felt very productive.

But, all in all, a one hour meeting became three and a half, and I ended up missing two scheduled meetings because of that. The meetings hadn't yet landed on the calendar - one because we were still discussing it via email, and the other because it was a standing meeting out of my control. But because our three and a half hour meeting extended over the time we were supposed to follow up and set the actual meeting time, we never set that time, and when I was playing catch up later that evening, I literally spaced on what day of the week it was, and didn't notice the other meeting had started until it was over.

All that's on me, of course - it's important to put stuff on the calendar as soon as possible, including standing meetings, even if the invite is only for you, and I have no-one else to blame for that broken link in the chain. And both I and my co-editor agreed to (and wanted to) keep "powering through it" so we didn't have to schedule a Saturday meeting. But, I wonder: did my co-editor also have cascading side effects due to this longer meeting? How was her schedule impacted by this?

Overall, this is an anthology, and book publishing has long and unexpectedly complex and tight schedules: if we don't push to get the editing done ASAP, we'll miss our August publishing window. But it's worth remembering that we need to be kind to ourselves and realistic about our capabilities, or we'll burn out and still miss our window.

That happened to me once in grad school - on what I recall was my first trip to the Bay Area, in fact. I hadn't gotten as much done on my previous internship, and started trying to "power through it" to get a lot done from the very first week, putting in super long hours. I started to burn out the very first weekend - I couldn't keep the pace. Nevertheless, I kept trying to push, and even took on new projects, like the first draft of the proposal for the Personal Pet (PEPE) robotic assistant project.

In one sense, that all worked out: my internship turned into a love of the Bay Area, where I lived for ~16 years of my life; the PEPE project led to another internship in Japan, to co-founding Enkia, to a job at Google, and ultimately to my new career in robotics.

But, in another sense, it didn't: I got RSI from a combination of typing every day for work, typing every night for the proposal, and blowing off steam from playing video games when done. I couldn't type for almost nine months, during the writing of my PhD thesis, which I could not stop at, and had to learn to write with my left hand. I was VERY lucky: I know some other people in grad school with permanent wrist damage.

"Powering through it" isn't sustainable, and while it can lead to short-term gains and open long-term doors, can lead to short-term gaffes and long-term (or even permanent) injuries. That's why it's super important to figure out how to succeed at what you're doing by working at a sustainable pace, so you can conserve your "powering through it" resources for the times when you're really in the clinch.

Because if you don't save your resources for when you need them, you can burn yourself out along the way, and still fail despite your hard work - perhaps walking away with a disability as a consolation prize.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Powering through taking a photograph doesn't work that well, does it?

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-nine]: phantom enemies

Published January 29, 2024 by centaur
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"I'ma gonna get that bird in the mirror, I swear, this is my territory, I'll show him---BONK!"
"Okay, this time for sure---BONK!"
"Tenth time's the charm---BONK!"

Not even putting up a screen in front of the mirror has helped; our little friend just hopped down onto the stairs of the cat condo (that "table" is a cat condo with a re-purposed glass tabletop, to give one of our now-passed older cats a place to sit and see the stars while shielding him from the rain) and started bonking the lower section of the mirror.

There's no reasoning with some people.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, I am making a direct comparison of people whose political beliefs are built around their persecution by imaginary enemies to a bird not smart enough to recognize his own reflection, why?

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-six]: make up your mind

Published January 26, 2024 by centaur
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Cat, when it's raining: "Let me out! Let me out! But not this door, it's wet. Let's try another door. And another! Or another! I gotta get out! Just hold the door open until the rain stops!"

Also cat, when it is nice and sunny: "Who cares about going outside? Ima gonna havva nap."

-the Centaur

Pictured: the cat-shaped void, Loki, actually using his void-colored cat tree for once. Image taken in infrared bands and color enhanced by NASA to show surface detail.

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-three]: and for the record …

Published January 23, 2024 by centaur
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... it's still one of the worst feelings in the world to turn back the sheets at the end of a long day, only to realize you hadn't blogged or posted your drawing. I had a good excuse yesterday - my wife and I were actually out at a coffeehouse, working on our art, when we had a sudden emergency and had to go home.

I had just finished my drawing and was about to snapshot it so I could post it, but instead threw the notebook into my bookbag, packed it up, and drove us home. Disaster was averted, fortunately, but the rest of the day was go-go-go, until finally, exhausted, I went to turn in and then went ... oh, shit. I didn't blog.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go back to the drawing board. But it did flip over to tomorrow while I was posting ... so, next day's post, here we come.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A jerky shot of me trying to document my wife's computer setup for reference.

[twenty twenty-four day fifteen]: photographic archaeology

Published January 15, 2024 by centaur
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I take a heck of a lot of pictures, seemingly way more than most of the people I know other than the ones in the movie industry; in fact, one of my friends once said "your phone eats first". But there's a secret to why I take pictures: it's for something, for the creation of an external memory - and memory is my brand, after all. With those photographs, I can figure out what happened in the past, even sometimes obscure things - like the attachment point of this lightsaber, which isn't just the diamond-shaped piece of wood, but also includes two hooks that seem to have disappeared in the move.

We may not find them, but at least now we know what to look for.

How can you turn the things in your life into an unexpected resource?

-the Centaur

Pictured: the old library, which was very nice, but not as nice as this one:

[twenty twenty-four day twelve]: this is why we don’t use pesticides

Published January 12, 2024 by centaur
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Some people wonder why me and my wife are so strict about not using pesticides and weedkillers in our yards. Well, there's the general principle of not contributing more toxic chemicals to the environment, and in San Jose there was the concern that our cats walked in the yard, then slept in our beds, and we didn't want them tracking in chemicals (other than dust and pee and poop, but, oh well).

But in South Carolina? We have a well. Our yard is our source of drinking water. And the recent unexpected excess precipitation event really brought that home by making the water drainage channels visible:

We get enough chemicals from our neighbors poisoning their lawns. We don't need to add any more to it. In fact, we're busy enough trying to slowly clean up the waste that the previous owners left on the property ... it's a nice house, but someone seemed to think that the woods around it were a dumping ground.

One step at a time. But one of those steps is, don't add pesticides or herbicides to your own drinking water.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, I understand a lot of chemicals get filtered out by the dirt. There's still no need to add to it.

[twenty twenty-four day eleven]: where water falls from the sky

Published January 11, 2024 by centaur
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When we decided to live in a place where water falls from the sky, we didn't realize how much we meant it.

The good news is that there's more places to go swimming. The bad news is that you can swim in only one direction, much like a muddy simulation of the interior of a black hole.

Honey, I hope you didn't need anything at the store.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day six]: you have to remember to blog …

Published January 6, 2024 by centaur
centaur 0

... or you're not blogging every day. And I even went down to the library TO blog, but forgot what I was supposed to be working on when I got here, and did a whole buncha other tasks.

So, anyway, here's a margarita. It was strong. Enjoy.

-the Centaur

[2024 post one] blogging every day, redux

Published January 1, 2024 by centaur
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Welcome to 2024, everyone! This year, I plan on resuming my aborted "Blogging Every Day" and "Drawing Every Day" experiments (and, perhaps, even "Music Every Day"). But let's focus first on the blogging. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people who regularly take out the time to comment on the world, because it gives me a view not just into their thought process but into the gears of the world as they grind.

As for my gears grinding, this first day of the new year has been quite busy! It feels like I did nothing, as there were things that I had planned to do this morning that never happened. But, actually, I spent a few hours managing (counts them) 8 research projects and 2 nonfiction book proposals, met with a friend/research colleague online, did some prepwork for the Neurodiversiverse, helped my wife with some plane tickets, resolved issues with some online systems, and hung out with a cat.

Little of that was on my agenda, but it all has to get done. And it's easy to forget that. One way I've been using to track that is Clockify, which I started using when my consulting business picked up a bit. It really helps you see what you've been spending your time on - or neglecting - if you remember to use it.

Of course, one of the things I had wanted to do this morning was enter my hours for the weekend. Time to get to timing it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Downtown Greenville's Falls Park.