TIL: Mojibake

the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.

Wikipedia by way of Hacker News, where I learned:

In Russian this phenomenon is called "бНОПНЯ" (read "b-nop-nya") and was caused by taking the word "Вопрос" (meaning: "question") in win-1251 encoding and reading it as if it was in KOI-8 encoding.

Also this is called "крокозябры" (read: kro-ko-zya-bry, nonsense word, no translation) especially when reading a binary file in a text viewer.

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RIP The Middle East

A Wilhelm Scream, likely the last show I’ll ever see at The Middle East in Cambridge now that they’ve got the notice on the window to start demolition for a luxury hotel.

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Teach Them to Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea

Three loosely related thoughts on “getting things done”. Entirely not something on my mind after a week of work, for any reason.

Fast · Patrick Collison: Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

Metrics are crucial and it’s good to be data-driven, esp to be clear what you’re shooting for.

However, it's easy to lose sight of the purpose and game the metrics. Chasing things like hitting 100% of goals or 6 nines uptime can mean you’re not innovating and taking risks.

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) September 29, 2022

Andrea used to have this quote by her desk:

If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.

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How to Beat Worry

I like blogs where people add little cartoons and drawings to the text, which makes me think I should do it more. This one does it, and is a good read: How to Beat Worry.

The last thing a worrier should do is wait around for something to happen. Anticipation doesn’t bode well for someone caught in a worry feedback loop, so the key is to proactively invest thought into a worthwhile challenge instead.

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Franklin Park Zoo

We had plans to visit friends in Dorchester today, and earlier in the week I thought “well what else can we do if we have to drive to Dorchester”, then realized the Franklin Park Zoo was nearby, and the weather looked nice, and it was “Princess & Pirates” day so why not.

We went to the zoo in 2020 but not to see the animals, to see the Zoo Lights. I’d never actually been there to see the animals. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give the zoo a solid 7. Going during Zoo Lights but not at night means the park is more decorated, and given that its past Labor day there wasn’t much of a crowd, although a few animals were away. I assume in Florida.

Notes:

• The “open air” exhibits were the big hits, like the rooms where the birds could fly around or the butterfly house.
• Lorelei: “ocelots in real life are cuter than in Minecraft”.
• I’ve always kind of thought of tapirs as being about the size of a dog about apparently some are 600 pounds.
• We spent a little over 3 hours there, which included eventually getting food because we had planned on being there more like 2 - 2.5 hours.
• 📸
  look at this absolute Chad.
• Driving to a point in Boston has gotten so much more annoying in the last 10 years that it might have been easier to drive to the zoo in Providence had we not already had a reason to be in Dorchester.

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THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.

Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.

If you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..

The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have not been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least. Or when I felt the least needed.📈📉💔

From THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.. Happy Friday everyone.

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DOOMCAT

We were out at lunch the other day and after burning through all the games on the front of the kids menu, Lorelei turned the menu over and started Tic-Tac-Toe on the back. Andrea suggested Hangman instead, and started explaining how you play it. It occurred to me that Hangman is… well kind of awful, so I suggested instead of Hangman we play DOOMCAT. Which is drawing a cat: two ears, two eyes, two pairs of whiskers, two teeth and then the DOOMCAT eats you. Which is also a little morbid but at least avoids antiquated forms of capital punishment.

We ran out of paper and then we ran out of food and left. Lorelei mentioned she liked and I thought, well, what if I just made it for you to play whenever.

So… I made DOOMCAT.

Some fun things:

• The cat emojis came from OpenMoji. They’re well set up for slicing for simple animations like this.
• Rather than set up a new project I made the entire thing in Code Sandbox then exported it to Github. From there I added it as a project in Netlify and made the custom domain a subdomain of this site which, as far as I can tell, worked and didn’t break anything.
• The GIF above was made with Gifski.

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I Want To Believe

Nice evening in Boston. Met up with the parents for dinner at Citrus & Salt

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A Little More Love for Links

I’m going to start treating links as content and not as a separate thing living under links. I started thinking about this by way of Stat’s Page on Jim Nielsen’s blog, which led me to Indexing My Blog’s Links, which got me thinking that all the inline links I post get lost in posts over time, and the posts I created as "link" type posts were... not numerous. There’s a lot of things I read which are interesting, and it’s a disservice to the Internet (alright… it’s a disservice to me when I go to look these things up again) to not treat them as the rest of the content.

So, I updated the links page to show all the external links ever posted here, and I’ll try to get better about re-sharing the good stuff I find. And I’ll remember to share links with the whole link title instead of some clever words because that might be clever but it is not helpful.

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