No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Alex woke up at 04:30 this morning with a migraine. Normally they hit him in the late afternoon or early evening; I can think of only a couple of occasions when they’ve happened in the middle of the night. After an hour or so of misery, he got back to sleep, but he wasn’t able to go to school this morning.
Fiona was the one who sounded the alarm. She heard him first, and came through to wake Abi and me. “Mom, dad, Alex has got a really bad headache.” Good kitty.
Why I’m off Twitter right now:
In strict terms of self-motivation, posting something and getting a good reception feels good. But most of Facebook use is watching other people post about their own accomplishments and good times. For a social network of 300 friends with an even distribution of auspicious life events, you are seeing 300 times as many good things happen to others as happen to you (of course, everyone has the same amount of good luck, but in bulk for the consumer, it doesn’t feel that way). If you were happy before looking at Facebook, or even after posting your own good news, you’re not now.
How we ruin social networks, Facebook specifically, by Casey Johnston on Ars Technica.
Why I’m blogging more right now:
The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written.
I’m writing this from my shiny new laptop, which is remarkably like the last one. My old machine (“Shovel”, as in, “greased shit off a shiny”) was an early 2011 15″ MacBook Pro (8,2) with a quad-core Sandy Bridge i7, dedicated Radeon 6750M card, and 8GB of memory. I had also shuffled around the internals a bit, replacing the main hard disk with a 300GB SSD, and moving the old drive into the optical drive bay. I reckon it was the best and most reliable workhorse computer I’ve owned to date. It was also still a perfectly good machine with loads of useful life left in it — which is one of the reasons I decided to trade it in right now, rather than wait another year when the lack of a retina screen might drag its value down more.
The new machine is a late 2013 15″ MacBook Pro, quad-core 2.3GHz Haswell i7, dedicated GeForce GT 750M graphics, 16GB of memory, and 1TB of PCIe flash disk. It’s not actually significantly more powerful than the old machine. The major benefits for me are that it’s thinner, 20% lighter, and gets twice the battery life because of the power-efficient Haswell CPU. I spent a lot of time travelling last year, and that’s not going to change any time soon. The retina display will be nice when I’m using the machine as an actual laptop and sitting close to the screen. I spend a lot of time working with virtual machines, so having an extra 8GB of RAM and all the on-board storage as flash will be useful, too. I’m strongly considering getting a CalDigit ThunderboltStation for when it’s plugged in on my desk.
It was the sheer weight of improvements across the board that swung me into upgrading right now instead of holding off. It’s an awesome machine, and I expect to be running it for the next 3-4 years.
Now: what to name it? (Also: stickers?)
Mum & Dad were over for a lovely visit this weekend. They arrived on Friday afternoon, so of course we had frites for dinner. (Friday is frites day.)
On Saturday five of us (no Alex) went in to Zaandam to do some shopping. We snacked on kibbeling (which, I just learned, used to be made from cod cheeks — kabeljauw wang — not just generic cod fillet) and deep-fried mussels from the market while wandering around. Abi and Fiona hit the crafts shop to get materials for crochet projects. Our other goal was for Mum & Dad to get Fiona a birthday present, and we quickly located a prized pink space scooter, although we did some price checking and stopped off for coffee (and hot chocolate) and cakes before actually buying it. Steak and salad for dinner.
In the evening we watched Robot and Frank, which is a sweet and funny film, lined with sadness. I’d seen the trailer, and I’d been too fascinated by the robot-human interaction story; I hadn’t realized that Frank’s dementia is the twin theme. It’s a sweet story, but it was a bit of an emotional trip for us.
Sunday, five of us (no Alex) had a walk around Oostzaan, ending up in at Eetcafé Oostzaan for coffee (and hot chocolate) and warm apple pie.
Our plan for the evening had been to order in Chinese-Indonesian from our wonderful local Het Oosten, but I’d forgotten that it was Chinese New Year. Fortunately our fallback take-way in Zaandam was open, so I drove out there to pick us up a minor feast. We played Kill Doctor Lucky after dinner for the first time, and it was a hoot. We’d been burned by the phenomenal complexity of Arkham Horror last year, but Kill Doctor Lucky is much easier, and plays moves nice and fast once you get going. We didn’t have time to finish a whole game before the kids had to go to bed, so we just called “sunrise” at 21:30. True to his name, Doctor Lucky lived to see another day.
Then we watched Drive, which was a trip of a whole different kind than Robot and Frank. The sound design of the film has incredible dynamic range, from ear-splitting car chases to long scenes of almost total silence. This matches the plot and emotional content of the story, which goes from calm and passive to brutal, gory violence in jumps you know are coming, but which nevertheless arrive as gut-wrenching shocks. The way the film builds tension is incredible. I loved it.
Monday was back to work and school. Mum and Dad went to Amsterdam for the day. We had burritos in the evening, and played De Mol (The Resistance) after dinner. Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day, and Mum and Dad went to Volendam and Edam, and we all went back out to Eetcafé Oostzaan for dinner in the evening. Alex ran into a classmate, and Fiona experimented with vanilla ice cream (turned out it was too delicious for her).
Departures this morning. But the kids and I will be over in Scotland in a few weeks to see them again soon.
Yesterday evening while reading browser statistics I stumbled across the fact that Firefox is another name for the Red Panda. I think I’d known this before, but it had slipped my memory, and I wasn’t aware of it when I ordered our Kigus for Christmas. It’s fitting, because although I like Chrome’s devtools, Firefox is still my browser of choice.
