Monthly Archives: January 2025

geek stuff, technology

printed books are best!

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a long time ago (1999-2000 era, so 25 years ago or so), i bought a printed book called “The Compleat Book of Scales”, which is an “exhaustive list of every possible scale and mode based on the Western European equal-tempered chromatic scale”.

it has been an invaluable resource, which i have used many, many times, since i bought it. the web site i bought it from, glassarmonica.com, has, apparently, been offline since may of 2021, and the book is, now, nowhere to be found.

i feel the same way about my notes from the tech school, which i originally collected between 1982 and 1984. i have not only used them multiple times, to this day, i know EXACTLY where to find information about screw-thread sizes, mouthpiece specifics, and ideas for how to treat ailing instruments of all kinds, which are easily transferrable skills in case i’m fixing our plumbing, or that sort of thing.

the internet is great, and everything, but there’s nothing that can beat a printed book that has been useful for its entire life. 😉

forward into the past, moe, pe(s)ts, the cloud drive crack of 2021

furgle

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moe went to orlando yesterday. she’ll be back wednesday. quill is staying with one of our dog-trainer neighbours, kestrel has decided that, without moe here to make her, she doesn’t have to come inside, so i’m having to potty her on a leash, and timmy hasn’t really figured out what’s going on, but it’s different, his primary wrestling target is not here, and the result is that he has reverted to clawing my legs and deliberately doing stuff he KNOWS he’s not supposed to do, to get attention.

i used moe’s computer projector to start the outlines for a new painting of timmy, which will use the correct colour palette, and i (finally) got started on the transcription of Galizianer Tants for the fremont phil. i hope to work on both of them, extensively, while moe is gone, primarily to give my mind something to concentrate on other than how miserable and lonely i am with nobody here except pets.

the other day, i found a photo that totally screwed up my presumed timeline in the new “list of when things happened” that i have been reconstructing ever since the cloud drive crack of 2021, which was a photo of me and some kids from SPARC in the spring of 1994, when i thought i remembered working at SPARC in 1992. i have some intermittent calendars from 1984 to 2005 that i went through, which SORT OF helped me get things straightened out — for example, i thought i had lived in randy’s apartment for a month, and in fred’s basement for 2 months, in 1995, but it turns out that i lived in randy’s apartment for a whopping TEN DAYS, and in fred’s basement for a little less than ONE month, before i moved to the rooming house in west seattle. i THINK i’ve got a slightly better handle on when things ACTUALLY happened, now, but there are still some things about which i’m not completely sure.

spam, the mallet, the very big stupid

this is getting REALLY frustrating! 😒

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on 250110 at 09:44 i received a message with the subject line “Your Microsoft order on January 10, 2025”.

i KNOW FOR A FACT that i did NOT make an order from micro$leaze on that date, or at any other time for the past 25 years, which lead me to one, inescapable conclusion:

THIS IS SPAM!

not only that, but, because of the fact that i DO NOT ALLOW my email client to render HTML, i could perceive, right away, that this was a not-very-well-disguised attempt to trick, or con an ignorant user out of money, at the very least (the URIs were all redirects from azure.com and microsoft.com to somewhere that is very defintely NOT associated with microsoft), and, very likely for the extremely gullible, credit card and/or other personally identifiable information, as well.

so, i jumped through my standard spam-reporting hoops, and determined that the message had, indeed, come from micro$hit.

it’s not a tremendous surprise, but, still, i KNOW FOR AN UNDISPUTED FACT that i did NOT make an order from micro$leaze, so i proceded to send a report to [email protected]

this afternoon, at 14:16, i got a return receipt from [email protected] — yes, you can still get return receipts, although you have to use an email client that supports them, which is getting more and more rare in these days of web-based, cloud-based email — which said:

Your message

To: MS Online Customer Service (abuse)
Subject: [EXTERNAL] ABUSE VIOLATION: Your Microsoft order on January 10, 2025
Sent: Friday, 10 January 2025 10:02:54 (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

was deleted without being read on Saturday, 18 January 2025 14:16:53 (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada).

as you may or may not recall, i have been going back and forth LITERALLY FOR YEARS with micro$lop regarding my ability (or, to put it more accurately, my INABILITY) to send email to micro$lump customers. they LITERALLY refuse to tell me why, but they have been blocking the DEDICATED IP ADDRESS i have had, from which ONLY me and moe send email, for ≈25 years, with infuriating gaps (when i complain about it) that last anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. the only even close to “reason” i have been able to get out of them is “because we can”. 😒

SO what i learn from this, is:

it is NOT okay for me to send email to micro$hit, because it MIGHT BE spam, and they will take active and aggressive steps to block it.

however, when i RECEIVE spam FROM micro$hit, they don’t even look at my report.

🤬🤬🤬🤬

And More, my music

And More And More And More And

finally, the And More bandcamp web site is getting a major overhaul, soon. the overhaul will contain ALL TWENTY SIX ALBUMS that we have produced since 1985, plus a new banner that says “And More – Discombobulating the Discombobulable since 1985”. 😉

Novus Odor Seclorox is a cut from the album “This Music Is Drugs”. it’s a .flac file, so it’s possible that your browser will balk at it. you can try using a different browser, or a different platform… or, you can wait until the overhaul is finished, and buy the physical album… 😉

i’m listening to music that i made, and haven’t actually heard for, sometimes, as much as 25 to 30 years… it’s scary, but it’s also AWESOME!

painting

p-n-t-ng

i have pretty much decided that, instead of figuring out a wash to make the painting more orange, and less pink (without spoiling the painting entirely, which is a DISTINCT possibility), i’m just going to leave the finished painting the way it is, and create a new painting, with a CORRECT palette. it will take more time, but it will end up with me having a painting i actually like, will leave the first painting untouched and unharmed, and it will give me something to do for a few weeks that ISN’T frowsting on the intar-toobs, which will probably be greatly beneficial to my mental health.

depression, medication, microdosing, mushrooms

🍄 🠁 20250107

i decided that 200mg wasn’t cutting it, so i went back to what i was fairly sure was a 250mg dose, but it turns out that it measures out at an average of 304mg… which is a .1g difference compared to what i have been taking, and definitely puts me into the “something is happening” state of mind, even after 3 hours… i wasn’t sure after the first one, but i skipped a dose, and was paying attention this time, and it’s plainly clear that i am “elevated”, compared to “normal”.

next step: is this amount of alteration “acceptable”? (tentative answer, probably not on a regular basis) can i function? (tentative answer, yes) will my alteration be perceptible to, and affect my interaction with others? (tentative answer, don’t know, not enough data)

also, what if i change the schedule, and go to one every three days, rather than every other day? (tentative answer, i like the “every other day” schedule, and i’m not really interested in MORE experimentation to figure out something new)

meanwhiles, i’ve got a couple of days to prepare another batch of capsules which are SLIGHTLY less potent than the ones i’ve currently got… 😉

HOWEVER
i’ve been itching for a “real” mushroom trip (i.e. >1g) for a while, and now that the panto is over, i believe it’s time to examine that more closely. 🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄

campbell global tree farm, new year, painting, pictures

the painting and the hike

since our trip to double bluff went so poorly, last year, we went to campbell this year, and successfully hiked about 5 miles without seeing another person… until we got outside the gate on the way back, at which point we saw what we could only guess was a keg party or something like that — five cars, one of which was definitely NOT going to make it all the way to the campbell gate (because the road is so pot-holed) inhabited by several girls in party clothes, and two guys on motorcycles (which are banned inside campbell), one of whom had what looked like a couple cases of beer strapped to his luggage rack… 🤷

as a xmas gift, moe and i were given paint-by-numbers sets based on a photograph of a pet that we sent in, in november. moe’s was a black-and-white photo of magick, which moe finished yesterday, and it looks like it was a professionally done painting. mine was a photo of timmy, sitting on one of his little shelves in the bedroom. we started the paintings on the 13th, and i finished mine last night, at ten minutes before midnight.

241231 23.49 Tim Minchin, The Cat -- paint-by-numbers
241231 23.49 Tim Minchin, The Cat — paint-by-numbers
it looks better from a distance, or as a photo… my guess is that part of the reason is that it started out as a photo, to begin with, but also, speaking as an artist, the colour palette is way off… timmy is a yellowish-orange cat, and the painting made him out to be pinkish-flesh-tones. now that i’m actually finished painting the numbers, my next task is to figure out a “wash” to make it more orangish and less pinkish. 😒

it’s really interesting to paint stuff again… i used to paint a lot, when i was in my 30s, and i still have a lot of sort-of “professional” painting equipment: an adjustable easel, a huge collection of paint brushes and palette knives, a couple mahlsticks, and even a bunch of blank, stretched canvasses, in the garage. i found out, today, as i was searching for a colour to make a wash, that all of my watercolour paints have dried up (which is no great surprise), so i’m probably going to have to scout out a new art supplies store, since the ones i used when i was in my 30s no longer exist.