A thing I keep seeing in #elisp documentation:

If such-and-such a condition occurs within function foo, it will signal an error.

Cool, which error exactly? I mean, I can wrap it in a condition-case and put a handler on t, but...

#Emacs

I've long known that certain ASCII control sequences could be mimicked by holding control and pressing a key, e.g.: backspace is CTRL-H, newline is CTRL-J, but I was today years old when I learned that the ASCII control code is just the ASCII value of the key being pressed along with control bitwise and-ed with 0x1f.

It feels weird that I hadn't caught onto this sooner.

Welp, it looks like our Instacart account is probably cooked. We need to find a replacement for that income quickly.

Fortunately, we were already in the process of trying to do that because of the wear and tear it was putting on the car. I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing concrete yet. We need something we can do on an on-demand basis so that we can work when our mental health permits.

I'm notoriously bad at interviewing for jobs. It always involves some element of exaggerating the truth (a.k.a. lying) which I suck at. It turns out for instance that the honest answer to "why do you want to work here?" (so I don't starve and end up homeless) isn't a good answer. 🙃

My partner has been dealing with $condition for a very long time. In that time we have tried many therapies and medications without much success. We have found $medication_a which actually helps, but causes $side_effect which is not sustainable. Fortunately, we've found $medication_b which makes $side_effect tolerable.

She's been on a waiting list to see a specialist for a while and finally had her first appointment today. After a single 30 minute appointment, his solution was to increase $medication_a while completely stopping $medication_b. When she objected about $side_effect (which she'd already told him was the reason for $medication_b) he said to just do $obvious_thing as though we hadn't tried that already.

What's worse is that he faxed the order to our pharmacy canceling her previous prescriptions.

Of course, I am not a doctor but what the hell is this guy thinking??

I think I've been able to pin down what it is that I like about #Emacs so much. When I first started using computers, I was using a TRS-80. If you didn't have a cartridge inserted, It'd boot directly into BASIC where you could program the machine directly. That wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

Modern computing seems to do its best to hide all that stuff away. Everything is treated more like a simple (albeit specialized) appliance, not a powerful machine that can be made to do literally anything you want. Instead, it's about what the various software vendors want it to do.

Emacs by contrast not only gives you all the tools you need to modify it in any way you want, but actively encourages you to do so. It feels a lot more like the computing systems of old. Perhaps that's not for everyone. There's a reason computers were so niche back in the early days. Most people just didn't care to learn what was going on under the hood, and that's valid. There's something to be said for a tool that just works effortlessly out of the box. Also, to be clear, you don't strictly speaking need to dig into the internals to use Emacs, but I prefer for my technology to serve me, and I'm willing to put the effort in to make that happen.

That's why it's a good fit for me.

Welp, I guess it's finally time to retire my jacket. I keep fixing it and it keeps tearing in other places. I got four years out of it, which isn't terrible by modern standards, I suppose.

It turns out they still sell that exact same style of jacket, so maybe Santa will be nice to me this Christmas. In the meantime, I'll just have to fall back on my older coat and just layer sweaters and such underneath.

I use a giant #org-mode repisitory to keep myself organized. I synchronize this repisitory between multiple devices using #git because occasionally I'll find myself out without an internet connection and it's useful for merging when they fall out of sync.

To that end, I frequently find myself issuing the command git commit -am stuff, which makes me feel kind of dirty, but it's just the easiest thing to do.

Luckily no one but me will ever see this repisitory.

#VersionControlCrimes

I've now seen two separate YouTubers refer to obscure stories from their past as " the lore".

I mean, really??

So I cancelled my YouTube Music subscription a while back. Interestingly enough, it still works without a paid subscription; they just add anti-features (i.e.: a ton of ads and the inability to navigate away from the app without stopping the music).

As it turns out, all these anti-features go away if you use it through a browser with an ad-blocker. I wonder how long it'll take them to lock that down.

I just accidentally dropped my Jinhao 10 #FountainPen and bent the nib slightly (at least it wasn't an expensive pen, right?).

I did my best to bend it back into shape by hand and oddly enough, I kind of like the way it writes now better than before.

It's been brought to my attention that while #BuyNothing groups are pretty useful, they tend to exist mainly on Facebook. It'd be nice to have such a group for #WaterlooRegion here on the fedi as well.

I'd be happy to set one up, but if there's one that already exists, I'd rather use that than start from scratch. Is anyone aware of such a group here?

#KWAwesome #WRAwesome #Kitchener #Waterloo #Cambridge #Guelph