Our office in Los Angeles was a residential/commercial mixed zoned space with office on the first floor and residential rooms upstairs, and I used to live in one of the rooms back in 2007. One day, I woke up around 7am on a Saturday with a police’s gun fairly close to my head (I don’t remember the exact details, but at least the officer’s gun was drawn out). He said that there was a 911 call from this location that had immediately got hung up, so he was surveying the area. I believe at the end there was nothing going on, so the police left. This kept happening about 3-4 times a year for the next 2-3 years. Once, the police arrived while our parking gates were locked and one of the people staying over was chilling in a chair in the parking lot, and he pointed the gun at her saying open the gates or something but she barely spoke any English. That incident felt particularly dangerous to us – she could have been shot if any misunderstandings flared up.

We tried to figure out what the heck was going on, but the closest people’s conclusions got to was that there was a poor phone wiring job and a landline call was triggering the wrong spot. Which begs the question – was a real 911 call happening elsewhere? And did those people turn up okay?

Eventually, the building was demolished for a new one, so we never got to know what the heck was wrong.

This 911 location story just brought out the memories of that.

When I read that Falcon Heavy reuses its main boosters to save costs, I thought they just dropped to an ocean location to get picked up and repaired. Then I saw the footage a week later – holy shit the rockets descend back to a pre-painted landing zone circle vertically? It’s hard enough to keep those things standing still, but you manage to land them like nothing as if it was a VTOL? Wow. Wow. It’s so ridiculous I can’t stop laughing.

meeting mom again gives me insights into my management style. i’ve been nagged into doing things to oblivion at home. may explain why i’m very hesitant to nag others to meet their deadlines and check-in on project progress, etc.

Im going to write a letter to Kim Jong-eun asking him to nuke Las Vegas first. So much stupid shit.

Im so gratefull for my current life, and all the daily experiences i get, where i dont have to deal with this garbage on a daily basis.

Lets all make a $20 donation to poor children of Nevada.

So, some forms of machine learning are like a brute force attack on the laws the logic?

(while rethinking this)

One unwelcome change in Win10 is how it implements languages and keyboard layouts. In Win7 and before, you could have Windows’s interface language in English but remove English Input Method Editor altogether, and just keep Spanish and Korean. Korean IME has a built-in English entry (using the right alt key), so English was not needed.

Win10 ties together default keyboard layout with OS display language, so in order to see the OS in English, I must have English IME. So now, instead of having two keyboard layouts, I have three.

Having two keyboard layouts means that the keyboard switching shortcut (Left Alt+Shift) acts as a on/off switch of sorts. I start typing thinking of typing Spanish and instead Korean comes out, no problemo I hit Alt+Shift without even looking at the taskbar and I will be on my desired IME, If what I see is not what I want, just hitting the shortcut switches the layout, which makes for very easy multilingual multitasking. However, if there’s three keyboard layouts in rotation, the alt+shift shortcut is no longer a on/off switch, it’s a cycle rotator. Now, if what I typed doesn’t come out as I intended, I can’t just mindlessly press the shortcut. if I do that, changes are I will do it a couple of times (like 4 or 5) without realizing that I “missed” the desired IME. So what used to be a “toggle” type shortcut now became a “cycle through” type shortcut. Now I need to look at the taskbar to see which is the current IME, then hit the shortcut, then look at the taskbar again because I don’t remember which IME comes in in the cycle order.

I wish it was like it was before. I don’t need the English IME.

I have a strange permanent problem with video playback, only happening on Netflix and Amazon Prime. (But not on Hulu or YouTube)

I have a multi monitor setup – 4 monitors, 3 of them 1080p, plugged to a NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti. Whenever I stream a video from Netflix or Amazon Prime in one of the two main screens on Chrome, the screen starts alternating between flickering, going green, etc, until going completely black or green. When I close the browser (I can’t see the screen, so I press Alt F4), screen goes back to normal. I had this problem previously on a R280X setup, and i3770 & i6700

A general Google search didn’t bring up anything specific.

For now I’m skirting the problem by plugging one of the monitors to a Windows tablet and connecting to the desktop speakers via Bluetooth. (So I don’t have to do so much recabling each time I watch)

One dissipating point of Crash Course Big History: The Deep Future is how, despite being assured that it’s very, very, very, unvisualizably far away, trilliion trillion trillion…. trliion years doesn’t sound like THAT much of time – especially when you write it as “10 to the power of 100”. Like, if a consciousness was immortal, it would just sit around for a long time, and wait patiently, and poof we would be there, like at the end of a long road trip, say from Arica to Punta Arenas. It probably speaks to how efficient the logarithmic notation is at zooming out quasi-infinite amounts into a speck of information. (The notation). I’m surprised that amount of time can even be represented in earth years, as opposed to, were it to exist, the time dimension’s equivalent of “light years” for space.

I’ve seen those videos that represent the 7,000 years of known history into a moving map’s representation of territories controlled by various human polities. It’s interesting, but 7,000 years represented in this way is not that long. It would be helpful if the 10^100 year thing was represented visually as a very fast spinning of the earth, where in each frame we can see a portion of the earth (a sixth of the sphere added to the sight in each frame maybe?), and we stare into the thing for.. i don’t know, 500 hours? 50,000 hours? split into videos of 10 hours each (YouTube’s length limit) to better represent the idea of “the amount of time after which some scientists predict matter will start slowly decaying.. headed to a heat death of the universe”

i remember when my digital program coach asked what inspires me to continue to do the work. what i described was 100% field organizing, which was throwing us off the curve because we thought we would find language that described my current focus, data and automation. well, there’s inspiring, then there’s fun. if for some reason inspiring and fun became a dichotomy, i’d always choose fun.

i had some light fever yesterday, and was given oscillococcinum (anas barbariae) by a colleague. It was unusual looking (dust in a tube), so I googled it, and found the above wikipedia entry. I said thanks but no thanks. Instead of ingesting some sugar and hoping it acts on the virus, I’ll get plain old traditional western medicine.

i was like “oh i need to pay today’s rent, i’m one day behind schedule (apt is pretty lenient)”, and cut out a check and was looking at my check records to see what the current rent amount was, and noticed i already paid the rent two weeks ago… -0-;

did i just get $900 for free?

over the weekend, i came across the youtube channel “classical musicians react to kpop” which was a very unique experience.. i had no idea that rap songs had chord progression!

Because there *are* kpop songs of questionable quality, this channel seems to focus more on iconic pieces or songs that do have musically interesting attempts or high quality pieces. That’s how I came across Ailee, AKMU and Mamamoo.

In particular I really enjoyed the jazzy touch and full volume singing in U&I of Ailee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4_rwTytAOs

I also get a vague impression of blackness performed in the song, especially with this visual sequence:

I’m sop glad to have found this channel