What I Learned in 2021 Week 8

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Bill Ruhsam
  1. It’s week 8 already. Time flies.
Felt foot on the bottom of a wooden chair leg
  1. I learned some methods for getting these stupid felt feet to stick to the bottom of my wooden chair in my home office. Here’s one. Here’s another that honestly looks dumb so I’m not going to do it. There are others but it seems that the way to go is to clean/sand/level the chair legs and then reapply and hope for the best.
  2. I learned that I had absolutely no idea how to spell “Perseverance.” Go Percy! The first image they showed at the press conference post-landing was the shot of the rover from the descent stage. I shouted “wow!” out loud in my office.
  3. Once again I remembered the utility of pressing SHUFFLE on my enormous collection of music on the supercomputer in my pocket. I’ve got over 60 GB of music and audio on my phone. Maybe 2% is regularly listened to. It’s useful to have it serve up things I don’t normally, ’cause once upon a time I found something likeable about that music.
  4. Speaking of music, been listening to this album quite a bit the last couple weeks. Good stuff by Lemoncello.
  5. Bean bag chairs are apparently an excellent substitute for a litter box by our post-surgical cat. Whee.
  6. La Citadelle de Lille in Lille, Fr. Wow. Check this out. Here’s a zoomable map of the layout of the fortress.
Plan view of La Citadelle de Lille, Fr.
Source: https://militarymaps.rct.uk/war-of-the-spanish-succession-1701-14/siege-of-lille-1708-plan-de-la-citadelle-de

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What I Learned in 2021 Week 7

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Bill Ruhsam
Griffin running around the Lassiter High School football field.
Griffin says hi.
  1. I still have not learned how to switch the new fancy-schmancy WordPress Block Editor into an HTML mode so I can see the code. It literally took me weeks to be able to list things using list numbers in a way that didn’t break.
  2. And now I have. Turns out there is a triple-dot icon on the top right of the screen, next to the Settings button which I’m assuming is why I never clicked on it before. That will take you to Code View, thank god. All the time I’ve been writing on the Web, since the web 1.0 for dog’s sake, I’ve been doing it with the HTML right in front of me. I’ll say, the Block Editor is nice because I know it’ll be compliant, but sometimes it tries to be too helpful, just like any other GUI.
  3. I learned how to play Mancala. I also learned that there are at least 3 different distinct games played that are all called Mancala. As I was taught to play by a 7 year-old, I went and looked up the rules afterward and there were some serious variations demonstrated online, all of which materially affect game play. Here’s the rules to Mancala we’re using when we play.
  4. I learned about NAICS numbers for classifying businesses in North America. My firm would be under 541330 for Engineering Services.
  5. There is a website that tracks the planes of dictators.
  6. The Baen Bar is shutting down (temporarily) because of the amount of political violence being bandied about there. If you follow me on twitter, you may remember this: