Category: blog

Lately, I’ve been dabbling in ruby programming. I’ve mentioned it a few times recently. I’ve also been thinking that what I’m doing would make for a decent beginners book. I’ve seen a few of the ones out there. The projects are much more involved and tend to focus on web applications. This would be more of a beginner-to-beginner style project. I’m thinking there might be a place for a smaller, focused book.

Last week I got sucked into a small coding project. I wanted a quick way to upload files to AWS S3. S3 acts like a FTP file server. But traditional upload methods like SFTP aren’t allowed. This makes the service tricky to use from the command line. I wanted a simple tool that I could use in three different ways: Directly from the command line. Inside of an Automator workflow “run shell scrip” action.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been plagued with sleep problems. This was more than not being sleepy around bedtime. This was not being sleepy plus not actually sleeping when in bed. I think it started with a few late nights. From there, I spiraled into becoming semi-nocturnal. I would be okay with the good kind of nocturnal. The kind where I could sleep peacefully and wake up as evening fell.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. There’s a slight uptick in total words.

“I’m sorry sir. The medbay is out of bodies.” I looked at the corpseman. He was about my son’s age, but breathing. “How long until the next batch of clones come online?” “Soon. The vats are scheduled to pop tonight. We can start reanimating once the memories are trimmed.” He turned and walked towards the lift, not waiting to be dismissed. The damned Personnel Restoration unit didn’t respect the chain of command.

The exact nature of CG4 remains a mystery. VLT image of the cometary globule CG4, click for larger image.

This has been one of those weeks where I’ve done lots of stuff. I’ve also failed to accomplish anything worthwhile. The highlight of the week was on Wednesday when the city decided to turn off the water to install new meters in the building. We got warning letters stuffed in the doorframe on Monday. So it wasn’t a surprise. I thought about toughing it out. But then I decided that having a working toilet for those six hours would be a good thing.

I already yell at my computers. I don’t want to yell at them just to make them work. Alexa is Amazon.com ’s answer to Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft ’s Cortana, which all come standard with different smartphones. She’s the latest sign that big tech firms believe our future involves talking to computers that can talk back. §

I’m not quite sure how it happened. Somehow I wound up on the night shift. I’m sitting here at 3:22 a.m. writing this. Over the last few days I’ve been staying up later and sleeping in. Misty, the root of all evil. I blame the cat for last night. She doesn’t want to play until I’m in bed. Then it’s super fun time. She keeps me awake by head-butting me for attention and attacking my feet.

I’m not sure what happened to the world. https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/562416681260027904