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Still keeping up the no-pants streak
(31 Aug 2020 at 23:47) |
Not too much interesting to report this month, which ended so abruptly that I again missed midnight and backdated by an hour.
I'm spending a lot of time each day running, 10k+ pretty much every day, which has been good for me physically at least, and uses up a lot of energy. I've kind of let myself start trying to run "all the streets in Allegheny County," but it's such a stupidly large area that all this really means is that I'm doing some long runs where I weirdly pace around the streets in some neighborhood, like the old days. I remember thinking once that Pittsburgh was too insane to ever finish, so maybe one day I'll feel the same about the county, but it's 745 square miles and I'd need to do dozens of 40 or 50-mile round-trip runs, so like ????. Still putting off the last few trips for Pittsburgh proper, partly because I'm trying to figure out my strategy for making a video (or something) to commemorate the project's completion.
In hacking projects, the Destroy FX plugins are all working in 64 bit on Windows now, with some additional modernization, and so that's likely to go live pretty shortly. I also upgraded my server spacebar.org, which broke some ancient stuff I've been using since the year 2000, and wasted much of my life force fighting with decades of database data that had been "converted" during the "automatic" upgrade from UTF-8 bytes (not correctly marked I guess) to Windows-1252 and then "converted" again to UTF-8. I feel like busted character encodings are a story I'm destined to replay for the rest of my life, really. Doing that kind of reminded me that my ancient functional web scripting language called "Aphasia" is perhaps a ticking maintenance time-bomb. I wrote the thing in college, now over 20 years ago, back when testing (this == NULL) was thing reasonable people did. And although I've rewritten the compiler itself to something basically acceptable, I'm still using the original version of the compiler to compile a bunch of old apps that I never ported. So this last week one project has been to try to port everything to "Aphasia 2" (new, far less insane compiler, only one decade old). For example, play the new version of Hangsnoot, which behaves exactly the same as the old one. (It was also funny to revisit my old to-do list app, which I hadn't looked at since grad school, but I did get to legitimately check some items off while testing it!) After I port all the apps I can delete "Aphasia 1" for real, and then maybe clean up some of the rickety stuff that runs inside the web server. Such are the burdens of the Tom lifestyle. But it is straightforward work and basically relaxing, and better to do it now than when the site's actively falling over!
In games, I played Terminator: Resistance since it was on sale and the reviews led me to believe it would be a good dumb shooter, but it was not very good. Then I played The Pedestrian, which was a nice clean puzzle game with a lovely visual presentation. Only took a couple hours and none of the puzzles were frustrating, so I can recommend this one. (Well, the inability to invert my y-axis in one part was frustrating! Come on, some of us are old guys!) Now I am onto Control, which is finally out on Steam, and it is good so far. |  |
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> all the streets in Allegheny County […] I'd need to do dozens of 40 or 50-mile round-trip runs
You could use different rules for the county, especially about starting or ending at home.
> Pittsburgh proper […] to commemorate the project's completion.
Hmm. So finishing with another silly costume run? That will be interesting.
> database data that had been "converted" during the "automatic" upgrade from UTF-8 bytes (not correctly marked I guess) to Windows-1252 and then "converted" again to UTF-8.
Sounds typical. Yours is not the only website whose backend suffers with similar problems.
> when testing (this == NULL) was thing reasonable people did
Ah yes. I am scared of my old code with the “if (--rcnt) delete this;” reference count decreasing function, but at least I'm not using it in a live webpage.
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| @jonas Ooh, I was hoping by `this` he didn't mean the C++ keyword. Nasty :P |
Wow, Hangsnoot was hoppin' in 2000 and 2001. Impressed and fascinated by how long your projects have been live and how you still keep them up. But one bug report: the album selector has been missing from the left side of AAD pages for a few years now. My apologies to whoever plays the Hangsnoot games I just set up where I treated it as an opportunity to show off my fancy vocabulary. After solving a few of them I realized I'm supposed to put in way easier words. At least the system rejected the David Foster Wallace neologism "malcathected."
How do you run so much and not injure yourself all the time? When I attempt any remotely ambitious running habit, my knees tend to get busted in some way. |
jonas: Indeed, I'm thinking about relaxing the rules. The one that would help the most would be exactly that one, although I guess my only real alternative to running is biking right now.
Anon: I did mean the this keyword. I really think that in ~1997 or so, this was legal, or at a minimum a reliably supported thing (I think I remember learning it from some Microsoft headers). Of course I know to avoid such undefined behavior now :)
Soctt: Couple theories on injury avoidance...
- I think I picked up running "the right way" in that I started regularly almost 20 years ago, running only a mile every day, and picked up mileage pretty gradually.
- Consider the selection effects (survivor bias) involved in us even having this conversation!
- It could actually just be that I am injured but I'm just habituated to it. My body definitely doesn't feel perfect at 41, although I mostly think of it as a "good" kind of sore. Arguably the herniated disc is caused or exacerbated by running (nobody really knows).
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