lee.ourand.me

Merlin Mann has a way with words. He somehow makes this piece of advice I’ve heard a thousand times actually feel compelling. Challenge accepted, Merlin.

Dan Sinker writes about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, their immense power in Indiana, and the man, George Dale, who relentlessly fought to bring ‘em down.

It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back. It takes throwing punches. It takes doing whatever it takes to beat it back, to protect those that are most vulnerable from its many attacks. And through it all, it feels impossible that we will win.

But we will.

• I’ve gotten a bit spoiled already, and pretty much can’t stand going anywhere during peak hours when John Q. Public is off work. I forgot Monday was a federal holiday, and went to a local cafe to get a little afternoon coffee with Cynthia until we saw the crowd. We noped out of there, and I made some fancy coffees at home instead. <insert some pithy line about voters’ economic anxiety>
• I migrated the bell pepper seeds to sit on top of the refrigerator, thinking some heat may help ‘em sprout. It worked! Looks like we’ll be swimming in bell peppers by the summer as planned.
• Went to a freshly constructed library near us just to get out of the house. I tinkered around with Loco for a bit while there.
• More snow! I’m really just over it, man.
• I’ve been using *nix systems of some type or another since the aughts. And I just learned that you can do string substitution in parameter expansion. I used this the other day to rename a bunch of files. It looks like this:

  for file in some*.files
  do
    mv $file ${file//replace_me/with_this}
  done
  

  Very handy!

• My relationship with the HelloChinese app has reached the state where it’s comfortable straight lying to me:
• Important reminder: 🗓️Pancake Day is Tuesday. Don’t forget to… well, you know the drill 🥞
• Finally paid my dues for Jess’s 2024 MotoGP Video Game championship dinner + drinks deal. He doesn’t read this blog, so I can be honest: he whipped my ass this year. If you are reading this, Jess: fuck you.
• Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there have been an upsetting number of sieg heils flying about lately…

• Duolingo’s out. Hello Chinese is in. Duolingo is fine. But after trying out the free version of Hello Chinese for a bit, it’s very clearly a superior product. They have actual audio (and video) of native speakers as opposed to the standard robot Duolingo voices. They support Traditional Hanzi, Duolingo doesn’t. They have a lot more explanations (e.g., Chinese speakers don’t actually say 你好嗎 (Nǐ hǎo ma / roughly “how are you?”), which is a phrase Duolingo generically teaches). And Hello Chinese quickly gets you reading stories / testing your comprehension, which has been cool. I’m reading like preschool-level “Peter likes coffee. Susan doesn’t like coffee. Peter doesn’t like bread. Susan likes fruit juice.” stories, but at least it’s something!
• The veggie seeds have sprouted! Well, most of ‘em. The bell peppers are pretty stubborn. Everything else is off to the races.
• Cooked up this eggplant parm recipe for Valentines Day din din. The salt / dehydration step along with deep frying made it 7/10 on the pain-in-hindquarters scale, but I’d be lying if I said those ‘plants didn’t come out real tasty. Made tiramisu for dessert. Cynthia’s an honorary Italian—those are her fav foods. Which, for what it’s worth, ‘Italian’ is one of the approximately 14 Mandarin words I can speak with any confidence. 她是義大利人!
• Week of crappy weather… I guess it got to me. Slow week. Not much else to report.

• Learning Mandarin is hard, man:

  是一点 （shì yī diǎn): it’s one o’clock
  十一点 （shí yī diǎn): eleven o’clock

  Understanding these tones is not coming easily.

• Started growing some veggies indoors in preparation for the Spring. We’ve got some onions, bell peppers, arugula, two types of tomatoes, and jalapenos going for now.
• The boards on our front porch have been getting a bit gnarled and wobbly. Most of the nails have totally rusted out, so they’re held together by approximately nothing. My dad came and helped me disassemble it. In doing so, we discovered: 1. there’s another porch under our porch, made of concrete. It’s in extremely awful shape, and is crumbling apart. I assume it’s probably made of reinforced concrete, and all the steel inside is rusting and falling apart and 2. the “new” porch is some fairly shoddy worksmanship. Anyway—the next house project is to figure out how to securely fasten our “new” wood porch joists to the slab of concrete underneath. We did successfully remove all the rusty nails, and replace ‘em with a handful of screws until we figure out how to do phase 2 reasonably well.
• Speaking of Rust, I’m resuming my Rust (we’re talking the programming language this time) education, a bit. I cruised through the rustlings exercises, which were an excellent intro to all the things that make Rust a bit unusual. I feel like I can move forward moderately confidently with all borrow checking, lifetiming, and Arc<Box<dyn Thing>>ing now.
• Trying to pay less attention to political news. But holy moly, what a week. The “this is fine” meme feels woefully insufficient to describe our situation.

• Welcome back. And Happy Groundhog Day
• We’ve officially expanded our gardening operation by a whopping 50% (went from 2 to 3 raised beds). I carved up our Christmas tree and tossed it in the bottom of the raised bed to make a Hügelkultur type thing. Emptied out one side of our compost tumbler to fill out most of the rest, and topped it off with some top soil we had layin’ around.
• Went on a not-quite-a-hike around Maymont yesterday, and enjoyed the relatively lovely weather.
• We attempted to begin a Star Wars movie extravaganza this weekend. But the Mandarin subtitles I was able to find from OpenSubtitles are all kinds of a mess. George Lucas’s fascination with adding random cut scenes to the various editions of his movies really goofs up one’s ability to find decent subtitles. After the 7th adjustment, where we had to offset the subtitles by over 2 minutes, we just gave up.
• Speaking of Mandarin, I’ve resumed my Duolingo Mandarin practice. I just got to the first section where I practice writing Hanzi. It’s damn hard to remember the direction / order to draw each stroke of each character. I can’t figure out the “rule” beyond ~roughly: left → right / top → bottom. Hoping it eventually sinks in, but at this still early moment, it feels like a borderline hopeless exercise.
• I made Taiwanese Sticky Rice(油飯) for dinner on Thursday as a belated Lunar New Year treat. It came out decently well for a first attempt. The recipe I followed had you make fried shallots, then add them to the rice, then steam the rice. So it completely destroyed the delicate delicious little crunchy onion bastards. That seems like a mistake. Will make some adjustments next time.
• To deal with the whole Prius battery dilemma, I just bought a new AGM battery from Costco. Popped that thing in (again, what a pain in the butt, Toyota!), it just worked. Good as new. I had my dad pop the old battery on his trickle charger for a day to see if it would still hold a charge. It appears it does! So now I’ve got a spare 12V battery I need to find a use for. Solar powered rain barrel pump project? Powered fence gate opener mechanism? The possibilities are endless!

• I declared victory too early for the battery dingus. That 12V battery seems to be toast now. I can get the car running, but the main display panel–which includes the speedometer–doesn’t turn on.
• The pizza dorks on the /r/pizza subreddit seem to mostly use 00 flour for their pizza dough. I’d avoided buying that mess beacuse I’m cheap and it’s way more expensive than regular bread flour or all-purpose flour. I expected (hoped) there to be no noticeable difference. But I finally got around to giving it a try, and made “proper” 00 flour pizzas last night. It made a big difference. Best pizza I’ve ever made. Sonofa…
• Not even one full week into whatever the hell this is, and I’m tired, boss.
• I learned about the
  Details & Summary HTML Tags

  No idea how long these've been a thing. But pretty cool.
• Lunar New Year this week. 新年快樂, y’all.