Darkoshi

quick walks

2023-06-23T09:17:01Z

Thought: It's no good taking a break from work and going for a "quick 10 minute walk" if I then spend an hour writing about it (in my daily notes file) and looking up things* that I got curious about because of it.
(*such as today, the different types of dog ears)

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bebop, exercise bike, umbrella, searching and finding

2023-02-13T08:42:26Z

I sent an initial email&text about getting the gate fixed, and got an initial reply.
I sent an initial text about getting a bunch of junk hauled away. There are a lot of wood boards and panels in the garage I want to get rid of, mostly still from the big shipping box from when my brother had his things sent here on a ship from Germany more than a decade ago.

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Qiao and I finished watching the live-action version of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix. I felt it was very good, and true to the original animated series although I don't remember many details of the latter (which I want to rewatch now). It's unfortunate that the series was cancelled after just one season. The character Ed only showed up once at the very end of the last episode; clearly a harbinger for the next season had it not been cancelled.

Ooh, I need to watch this:
Cowboy Bebop: Unlocked | FULL SPOILERS Official After Show | Netflix Geeked

Dang, looking at a couple other videos and their comments, some people really hated this live action version. Sigh.

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For over a year, the good exercise "bike" at my house has been half-disassembled. It is a cross between an exercise bike and elliptical trainer. Qiao bought it when he was living here, then ended up getting another one for his house too. Since then, I've used both of them much more than he ever did. The center part of this one's flywheel got worn out. It didn't turn smoothly anymore and began producing graphite-colored dust which fell to the floor beneath it. So in December of 2021 I removed the flywheel to inspect it and tried thinking of how to fix it. This weekend I finally did something. I cut off a piece of metal tubing of an appropriate size and glued it into the worn out hole. After giving the glue time to dry, I reassembled the bike (not an easy task) today. It works. But the flywheel is a bit wobbly and still seems to have the same problem as it did before, so it probably won't last long. I suppose next time I will take it apart for metal recycling.

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Often when I'm looking around my house for an unspecific thing of a certain size or shape, to use for a particular purpose (such as a narrow metal tube yea wide for fixing the exercise bike), I find something that is just right. This never ceases to amaze and delight me. This time, I first found a curtain rod which was the right diameter and could be cut shorter with no ill-effect on its curtain-holding ability. But the tube wasn't solid metal all the way around - it had a lengthwise slit. So I searched some more, and found a perfect solid tube on an old broken umbrella (the lime green umbrella mentioned in this post.)

I took the umbrella apart to get to the tube and to be able to cut it. Umbrellas truly are marvels of engineering. This one was a relatively small umbrella yet it had a 2-foot long spring inside the center.

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tv books sun

2022-04-08T08:49:40Z

I've finished watching the last batch of Resident Alien episodes, and am still enjoying the series a lot. It is still quite amusing as well as touching. It's more about friendships than sci-fi.

Other TV recordings on Qiao's DVR still remaining for me to watch:
A Million Little Things
Killing Eve
The Wonder Years

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Since working from home, I've read very few books. I used to mainly read books during my lunch breaks, sitting on the picnic benches by the pond at work. I no longer take full-fledged lunch breaks like that due to the many other small breaks I take during the day. It takes me long enough to finish my work hours each day without adding an hour-long lunch break in between.

But last year I started reading books again, even if at first only while flossing my teeth before bed.

I finally finished "Good Omens", which I had started right before the pandemic. I didn't find it very amusing* nor did I feel a connection with any of the characters. But I still want to see if I like the TV series that was based on it. Maybe I'll connect more with TV characters.
*Perhaps some of the British-based humor passed me by, but perhaps also, satire of Christianity doesn't seem funny to me as I don't have enough esteem for the religion to begin with.

Now I've also started book-reading while using the exercise bike, which I try to do twice a day for ten minutes or more. Reading a book distracts me from the effort and tediousness of the exercise even better than playing word games or scrolling thru random DW entries.

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Lately, I often work on my laptop outside during the afternoons. I've sat outside in the sunshine enough this winter and spring to have gotten a tan on my arms.

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Smart Cat and other random things

2021-05-09T07:44:52Z

I like the short Exercise with Smart Cat segments on PBS that are shown between some children's programs.
I can do that! It's fun, easy, *and* good for me, yay! It gets me up from my chair whenever it comes on.
I have the TV on to drown out the sound of the neighbor dog who is barking.

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I've got a headache but no fever, which isn't unusual for me.
I worked in my yard for several hours today.
The back of my neck is achy. It may be exacerbated by stooping down to pull weeds, which I did Wednesday and today. It was bad enough yesterday that I started considering getting one of those neck braces like the pharmicist lady on the Doc Martin TV series was always wearing. Maybe those things support the head, taking stress off of the neck? Or maybe they prevent you from turning your head... I'll have to read up on it.

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Heard on TV: "The moose is on the loose!" hahah

I tried something out, using dandelions as an artistic tool. Coming soon to a universe near you! Maybe.

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I'm trying to clean off my table. It is taking very long and I'm only making small inroads.
Oh that's right, I wanted to try out the new Wyze sensors that are sitting there in that box.
And I also wanted to buy a raspberry PI to see if that makes the old sensors work more reliably especially as I wasn't able to get their bridge to reconnect after it had a problem last week.

There's the folder with my tax docs. I can put that away now; I've already gotten my tax refunds by direct deposit, as well as this year's stimulus payment too.
There, that is done.

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You know how in some commercials they have the legal stuff spoken very quickly at the end?
You know how, to a native English speaker, Spanish sounds like it is spoken very quickly?

Well, I saw a commercial on a Spanish-language TV channel, and the legal stuff that was spoken at the end of it sounded even more blisteringly fast than the English-language ones.

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A note I wrote on a paper on the table:

"My hands look old.
My skin is dry and textured."

They don't look quite as old to me today as they did then.

Starting in December I went 4 months without any significant menstruation, only minor spotting. It was great. Last month I got a period again. Maybe the note was from the dry period, an unwelcome side effect.

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On Thursday, I had saved a short audio recording... it was after my laptop microphone hadn't been working, but then it worked again. In it, I said:

"Testing One Two Three... NOW why is it working!!??.. But fine, it's working, right?"

I was idly playing around with that recording. I selected short clips of it and played them back several times in a row. Then I reversed one of those selections ("NOW why...") to see what it sounded like backwards. I did NOT expect it to same the same backwards as it did forwards, but it DID, which blew my mind.

forwards
backwards

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I saw this beginning clip of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" on TV the other night, and it made me laugh so good! I happened to be laying on the floor while watching it to begin with, so it was really a ROTFLOL moment.

I didn't end up watching the whole episode, as I had to finish up my work, but I need to watch the full thing (again? not sure if I've seen it before) one of these days.

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what I do when other people aren't around

2021-01-16T21:13:04Z

OMG, I am out of shape.

It only takes me running around through the rooms of the house, stopping in each one and doing three squats and shouting "Yay! Yay! Yay!", about 3 or 4 times till I'm totally out of breath and my heart is pumping out of my chest.

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Peloton

2019-12-10T15:31:08Z

The Peloton ad seems a bit weird to me, but not offensive or sexist. Maybe she wanted an exercise bike. I remember 2 times when I asked for one either at xmas or my birthday, when I was younger. And just because she's thin to begin with, doesn't mean she's in very good shape, cardio-vascular-wise. Was there really a lot of hoopla about the ad, or did someone only want to make it seem that way? Trolls? I would think that the exposure, even if supposedly negative, would actually be a benefit to Peloton, not a drawback. I wasn't familiar with their company or product before. I saw the SNL skit (which briefly mentions Peloton at the end) before seeing the ad, and only looked up the ad after Qiao mentioned something about it.

Pelotón is Spanish for "platoon".

Oh, it also is a term used in bicycling. I wasn't familiar with that one.

But other than that, now I remembered why the word is familiar to me. It was the name of a secret organization in the TV series "The Tunnel".

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standing desk setups

2017-01-17T05:00:49Z

I bought this adjustable shelf to try out as a standing desk setup. It's wide enough for both the keyboard and mouse, and deep enough that I can rest my forearms on it.

At home, my laptop is on an adjustable mount that can be lifted and lowered, so that is how I raise and lower the display. At work, I have 2 monitors, one on the desk for use while sitting, and one on a higher shelf for use while standing (to switch between them, it only requires an alt-ctl-fn key press).

The above is okay in terms of comfort. (Having my skin touch cool metal is unpleasant, so I cover the metal with cloth as in the above photo). But to switch from standing to sitting, I need to re-position the keyboard and mouse from the shelf back to the desk, and move the shelf away. The shelf, while light, is big and awkward to move around. So switching between standing and sitting isn't a very simple matter. (Though, if the keyboard were wireless rather than corded, that would help somewhat.)

I found the below setup to be more convenient.

I use a box (or a stack of books) to raise up my mouse & mousepad. I've found that using the mouse is most comfortable when my forearm is horizontal like that, not angled up or down.
I put a wedge (about 2" high) under the keyboard (or stick something else under the front edge so that it is higher than the back edge). Typing is fairly comfortable to me in that position, even though my palms & wrists don't rest on anything. Without the wedge, I would have to bend my wrists a lot, which quickly becomes very uncomfortable.

To switch from sitting to standing, I just need to move over my box, put the mouse & mousepad on it, and slip the wedge under the keyboard. It's much simpler than the shelf.

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green black fuse sit-less

2015-06-10T04:41:12Z

I'd been wanting to make these green tea cupcakes ever since Qiao gave me the fabulous vegan cupcake cookbook. I finally bought the essential ingredient - matcha green tea powder - last year, but didn't get around to actually trying out the recipe until last week. The cupcakes turned out soft, fluffy, and super-duper yummy, even without any marzipan flowers on top.

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It is blackberry season. I've seen people gathering berries along the roads. On the way home from work today, I stopped by a patch and picked some myself. I'm glad I stopped at the place I did, as 2 other people were already stopped by the larger patches further down the road which I passed by later. As it was, after stopping my car where I did, it took me a while to gather my courage to get out of the car. I had a silly fear that someone would come out of the commercial building whose driveway I was parked in, and accuse me of stealing their berries. From the car, I couldn't even tell if there were any ripe berries in this patch. But I finally got out, and got me some lovely berries.

Thin dress pants aren't suitable attire for blackberry picking. A branch snagged my pants and tore out a few threads before I managed to get free. Denim would have been better.

After getting home, I checked the bushes across the street and picked some more berries there too. But those were tiny compared to the others.

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I remedied the pinholes in the curtain black-out liners by using fusible web to iron on extra strips of black-out fabric over the seam lines.

The black-out fabric and/or the fusible web gives off fumes while ironing it at the necessary heat level. But at least those fumes were temporary.

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Knoppix! I created a live disk and used it to boot my laptop to Linux. Neat! The last time I created a similar live disk and tried it on my old computer, I never got the internet working as that would have required finding and installing the necessary wireless drivers. But this Knoppix live CD had everything I needed - my wi-fi and internet worked, as did my external mouse and keyboard.

I was using Linux in order to reformat a 256 GB flash drive as FAT32. Windows didn't let me do it. Linux did.

The reason for reformatting the flash drive is a story for another time.

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Partially inspired by this post by gfish, as well as articles such as this one, I've been trying to do more work standing up.

When we moved buildings, I was given a 2nd monitor. Rather than position it side-by-side with my other monitor, I put it on my cubicle's shelf, after moving the shelf down a few notches. That puts the top monitor at a fairly good height for me to use while standing. So now I have one monitor on my desk to use while sitting, and another on the shelf to use while standing. I can position my mouse higher by using a small stack of books. But I can't really get the keyboard high enough to be very comfortable while standing.

I was thinking that rather than moving the monitor and accessories up and down, it would be simpler to have everything up high, and to have a high chair. Then everything would be at the right height whether I was sitting or standing. Maybe someday.

For now, I can only manage to stand for a few minutes at a time before I start feeling tired/uncomfortable, or before I feel the need to sit down to do something that takes my full attention. Working while standing is sort of like trying to write with my left hand - I can do it, but at a slower pace and with more frustration.

Sometimes I stand in a spread-leg or horse-riding position, which brings my torso low enough to comfortably use the lower monitor and keyboard. But I don't do that for long either, as it makes my feet tired, and I feel self-conscious about looking weird to anyone who walks by.

Then again, I do full-body stretches in my cubicle a few times a day, which surely is a strange sight to see, too.

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work jump foot run

2011-09-16T03:27:53Z

Yesterday, I finished my workday by 5:30pm. I've been working into the evenings for so long, that it was a surprisingly nice feeling to be finished so early.

Earlier this year, I rediscovered the heart-thumpyness of jump-roping. I tend to sit at the computer much of the day, and I thought that taking small breaks to jump-rope for a few minutes several times a day would be a great way to keep in shape while working from home. But soon thereafter, my right foot started feeling strained. At first I thought it was from the way I sometimes sit on my foot. I forwent jump-roping for a while, to avoid further stressing said foot. Even now, it doesn't feel completely healed. I now suspect a slight fracture in one of my foot-bones, and that the jump-roping may have caused the problem in the first place. It worries me that if I try jump roping again, the foot may start hurting again. So... no nice easy keep-in-shape thingy. sigh.

With work, it's rather neat, having our entire application now be able to run on my machine, even the formerly-mainframe part.

Sometimes after I disconnect from the VPN, I have problems connecting to my MS-SQL database. Not sure why.

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is something afoot?

2011-08-26T03:47:06Z

Both Dreamwidth and Netflix are experiencing technical difficulties.

I was quite tired today after work, considering that my body had only been sitting around all day. Too tired to even go for a walk. But I did manage some exercise.

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heart thumping out of breath

2011-03-04T23:04:17Z

Either I'm very out of shape, or jumping rope is a lot more strenuous than I remembered.

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