So, i'm writing a program/dll to make API calls to a data provider. For the API itself, disregarding authentication, i have only implemented GETs. Well, i just did a POST and after verifying it worked, i thought to myself, "that was my first post". At which point, i felt a strong need to post that here.

There is a Michigan Left directly opposite the exit of a busy parking lot. It's difficult to explain a mindset, but there are three major reasons you exit: to go straight to the turnaround, to turn right onto the street, to turn right and get on the freeway. All three options are common.

The turnaround has a sign that says, "turn right only". I argued with a friend if that meant, "do not go straight" or if it meant "if you turn, it must be to the right" because it is one way traffic. Turn signs here are confusingly placed; even when you get on the freeway there's a no left turn sign. What's up with that?

Anyway. i went straight out of the parking lot today (just like the guy before me did a minute or two earlier) and a cop stopped me, telling me i couldn't do that. I told him, everyone does it and there are two lanes in the turn (no line marker, but you could easily fit two cars in there with room to spare) and there is only one lane leading up to it. (It is obviously made to do this, because of the placement of the turnaround (which came second) and the two lanes.) He told me the width was there for long cars and i almost did not give him enough room to make the turn. (He was in an unmarked car, though from the looks of it, i figured he was probably a cop anyway. I did the turn right in front of him, because i thought it was legal.) He also explain the solid white line barred the maneuver. He was nice the entire time, and i was not argumentative. Anyway, i got a ticket for "improper lane usage". The remarks read (in all caps):

Drove across NB Greenfield RD from private drive to get to turn around lane 4 lanes over over solid white line

That sounds pretty bad. Heh.

Anyway. the street is shared by two cities, and northbound isn't in his, so, i wonder how he could give me the ticket anyway. That is, the violation itself was in a different city that he is supposed to patrol.

The court date is in 14 days. I have to speak to a lawyer and see what's going on. At the very least, i can finally get clarity on two things: can a cop of one city give tickets in another, and is that straight across drive allowed.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

When I submit a comment, the resulting page usually doesn't load. It just spins for ages. Now it works. If you can see this, the journal is also fixed — I haven't been able to post to mine for months. Is this a nginx fail or something?

I wrote some user scripts for /., you can find them (with some other people's) on GreasyFork. The scripts remove hostnames from Slashdot links, so you're not being bounced to multiple hostnames, and to send you straight to the domain if you do get sent to a hostname by mistake.

I got interested in actually doing this because I couldn't leave comments on *.slashdot.org a few days back, only on slashdot.org. But it's annoying all the time, IMO.

My scripts probably have no elegance whatsoever, but they work.

Last time I tried to post to my journal I got an error, so I'm trying again now.

The Cambridge volume has been released. A bit expensive, so i will either have to wait for the price to come down or to borrow it from a library that may have it.

I started this search on 9/10/13, and now it ends about 5.5 years later. Time passes and things happen, i guess.

Project Gutenberg finally has De Temperamentis available for reading. It took nearly 5 years but its done. Wow.

The Cambrige volume has a release date of February 2019, but is still not out. I assume it will be done very soon.

and there you are

I've been hanging out on reddit, all while hating it. I've known for years it was a cesspool and avoided it, until eventually TIL pulled me in. I have noone to blame but myself.

Sometime back, Storium popped up on Kickstarter. I loved it so much i pledged $40 and played it quite a bit. I got a lot of time to let my imagination run free, and it was fun; it really was a good forum for creative outlet. But there was no forum. I asked the owner if there was to be one or for permission to create one, and he asked me not to, and pointed me to reddit. I accepted his request and eventually gave up on Storium. I figured, no forum, no real product. Storium was the type of product that needed a decent forum to support it, and reddit was a cesspool.

Traditionally, forums were hierarchical. The reason was simple. There were so many divisions or subdivisions for what you want, that you ought to find the right one for your question. Hierarchies help with finding the right place because it is like a flowchart. All that works well on paper.

Windows 95 created the Start Menu and replaced the Program Manager interface with a hierarchical one. It was a great idea, but noone used it. Everyone stuffed what they needed in the Start Menu, there were no established subgroups, and start menus everywhere were not navigable. Microsoft could have had a place for everything, but they did not. They never fixed the problem, instead they rolled with it. What did they do? They added a search bar for the Start Menu. It was as if they said, dump your program hewre, then search for it when you need it. They copied Apple yet once again.

When i used Windows, i had my own rules about the start menu. In general, no more then 5 folders per level, and everything used often had a hotkey. I was able to find or start nearly any program with seconds, simply because it had a hotkey, and the ones that did not, i was able to find quickly. To me, that was what the start menu was for. People would see my organization and compliment me, but noone would copy it. Even more, when they tried using my system it would take them a while to find things. They were not used to my way of thinking.

My takeaway was, that most people don't care about how they get their program started, they just want to memorize it and move on, and for the ones that care about a decent method, it is not usually worth the effort to design and maintain. Fwiw, Debian implemented a half decent one in their menu, so a company doing it for many people seems to be acceptable. This left people with unkempt menus and a simple search to find it. I hated it when that was introduced, because it was "wrong," even refusing to use that lazy feature. I use it now on other people's systems, it just is.

Reddit and other top down forums follow the same idea. There's no reason to split into a hierarchy, because searches will find most things. And, for people who want to see everything, the top down approach lets them see what is new. But that only helps if you know what to search for, or you want top watch everything. What if you don't? Ideas came up for tags or pseudo-hierarchies. None really caught on, and a simple top down style is the new approach.

Over time, i realized that like many things, forums could be split into three groups. Groups where only recent things truly matter and a history is kept just in case (like a help forum), top down is the best approach. Conversely, forums where multiple items are discussed or historical discussions are still of value, hierarchical is best. But for forums that do not cleanly fit into either, it comes down to personal preference. If that is true, reddit's TIL or many of their help forums are best as top down, because historiocal posts don't mean much. But r/jung, where the same questions are asked over an over again, would fare better hierarchically.

Storium had both. It was for people to discuss what they were doing (top down) and for discussion of how the system works and is best used (hierarchical). They preferred top down, i preferred hierarchical, hence the conflict. Meh. I'm making much too big a deal over it.

I guess that's it. That's what i wanted to say. I admit that the top-down style has its merits. But that they replaced the hierarchical style instead of adding to it, just replaced one broken system with another one.

So, i'm trying to learn graphql-php, which is really hard to do when you cannot find any good documentation. Everyone seems more interested in explaining how it is better that REST than to explain what it actually is. And (some of) the tutorials don't really work, probably because they expect you do know some things already, and they just want to explain "how to do it here". But i digress.

I was reading About graphql-php when i came across the "Current Status" section with the following text:

The first version of this library (v0.1) was released on August 10th 2015.

The current version (v0.10) supports all features described by GraphQL specification (including April 2016 add-ons) as well as some experimental features like Schema Language parser and Schema printer.

On second thought, that might explain why i don't understand what they are talking about.

I guess this is an ad of sort, but i wanted to share. I have been using Linode for some years and am quite happy with them. Basically, its virtual root with a decent UI and support team. They charge by the server, either by month or by hour, and the basic system is $5 a month. Need a quick server or command line, within minutes your up and running. My only complaint is sometime "recently" they changed from the hierarchical support forum to the top down style. Ugh.

Anyway, i ran across this page offering a $20 credit signup bonus. At the very least, that's 4 months free. If used just when needed, that can last quite some time.

Just wanted to share. I think they are worth checking out if you need virtual root.

FACT CHECK: Snopes is no longer a website (Tb). When you go there without javascript you don't see any images. When I activate all the reputable javascript sources, I still don't see all of the images. I am no longer going to cite Snopes for debunking as a result. Are there any good fact-checking websites, as opposed to Javascript SNAFUs?

Andy used to own a roofing business but has since mostly retired. He no longer has any employees or major equipment, but he does work a few hours most mornings to keep himself busy and make some money. Bob is a friend of mine, who is also friendly with Andy, and somewhat recently started to work with him in the mornings, giving Andy the help that he needs.

Bob had to go out of town one day and Andy needed help. So, it was arranged that i would go in his stead. I know nothing of roofing, but i can hand him stuff or whatever and be mildly helpful, at least better than having noone there at all. I agreed to go simply because Bob asked me to, and off i went.

It was arranged that i would meet Andy at his house at 7:30. I rode my bike over and i think i was 2 or 3 minutes late. He had called me when i was just around the block from him, maybe a minute away, asking me where i was. I am usually prompt, but i miscalculated. Regardless, i know that he is a stickler for time, which is funny, because Bob isn't.

When we got to the worksite, he put up the ladder handed me a bucket and asked me to take it up. I climbed two steps and froze. The first two steps of the ladder seem super easy, but the third step is where you are now actually climbing a ladder. It seems simple, simple as walking, right? But it isn't. There's a couple other things involved.

I have a fear of heights. So do a lot of people. Though, when most people say they have a fear of heights they actually mean they have a fear of falling. I have that too. But i also have a fear of heights which manifests itself in my ankles. If i am standing next to a tall structure and look straight up, my ankles tense up and begin to hurt. Once, at the Gateway Arch, i looked up to the top and nearly fell over. I think someone caught me, though i don't remember exactly. This is an irrational fear that i have litle control over. While the good advice of "don't look down" helps with the fear of falling, it does not help with the latter.

So there i was, frozen. He said i did not need to climb it up, and then i watched him go up and down the ladder a couple times before i climbed up. I was afraid because i kept putting my left knee past the side of the ladder, but that is normal. When i got to the top, i walked off (it was a flat roof), but he showed me that i had made a mistake by not holding onto the top of the ladder when i got off it. That can cause the ladder to fall! You must hold the ladder when getting off at the top. He said to hold the top of the sides, something reinforced by Bob when he showed me as well.

Getting down the ladder also took some watching. It's really easy when you know what you are doing, but it does not come so naturally, at least not to me. They seem to know how to do it but can't explain it without watching themselves do it. It's just one of those things they see as being so easy that they wonder why others have issue with it.

I helped on the roof, but not as much as he would have liked, mostly because this isn't my forte, and what needs to be done does not come naturally to me. I can make guesses, but unlike him i will be wrong. And he didn't explain things well, i must learn to watch silently and only talk when he is not in middle of something.

On the way home, Andy gave me $50, which i thought was overwhelmingly generous for how little i had done. I never expected him to call on me again. Indeed, he told Bob that i had issues with the ladder and mentioned other things. Oh well. I hope i helped at least a little.

But recently, Bob just came back to me because he is planning to go out of town again soon, and "my name came up" as a helper. He must be desperate. Heh. Anyway, Bob just started giving me ladder lessons. I feel so silly needing them, but it takes knowledge and practice to do it safely and comfortably. I even went to look it up only and watched a few videos. All of them show how to setup the ladder and other safety issues, but only one showed how to get off and on at the top. Fwiw, if you will get off onto the roof from rung A, you stop one rung below rung A. Then, with your hands on the rung above rung A, you place your non-dominant foot in the middle of rung A, and lift the dominant foot onto the roof, then your non-dominant foot, and only then take your hands off the rung. To get back on, simply reverse these steps. It takes a little getting used to to make it natural, but it makes sense.

Bob is showing me how to do it on his roof, but that's a slanted roof, making it all that much scarier. I asked him to leave getting off and on to another day, as it was too much for me to handle in one day. I keep asking him to spot me by being near the bottom of the ladder, because just being there makes me feel safer and therefore more confident when climbing above the bottom two steps. I vacillate between considering this a skill and seeing it as something that ought to be as simple as walking. Maybe with practice one leads to the other.