This evening I cleaned up my kitchen. Even seasoned my cast-iron pan with some flax oil I overpaid for today. And I must admit it came out really nice. Yes, I watched about a dozen (two dozen?) YouTube videos on seasoning cast iron pans yesterday evening, what’s your point? Anyway, my clean kitchen. Go me. Feeling rather successful I decided to reward myself with a cup of hot chocolate. Unfortunately that was… not quite so successful.
This is from a facebook post on 18/10/2016. It was a rather odd evening.
Just learned a lot of things.
After a lifetime of talking politics, we were kind of ignoring this
election. There were other, more immediate concerns. I’m not sure
when she first asked, but it was when Bernie seemed to be doing
better than the pundits had expected.
The Zombie genre has been a bit, well, full the past number of years. But there are still some really interesting stories nestled in amongst the survivalist ammosexual fantasy crud this genre has descended into. Happily this is one of them. Reviewing this without giving bits away is hard. So I’ll say first off that I liked the book. It leaves you wondering what you’d do; whether the right decisions had been made.
A number of years ago I was introduced to the Escape Pod and Drabblecast podcasts. And when reading up more about them I discovered the Drabblecast forums and the amusing Drabbles (100 word stories) and Twabbles (100 char stories). I even got a few on the show and thought I’d put them here. Note that the drabblecast is for weird stories… Four times they took him. Every time an anal probe.
One of the neatest bits of my first trip to Denmark wasn’t Legoland amazingly enough. It was a place that did liquid nitrogen ice cream. Istid is this little shop on a residential street in Copenhagen. Happily the street I was staying with a friend on! The setup is simple: on a counter behind glass are four brightly coloured Kitchen-Aid mixers; opposite them is a chalkboard explaining the four flavours of ice cream with toppings they offer.
An update to my original retirement post. One issue I didn’t really highlight in the original post was debt. Pay it off. Not having debt could be considered a leg in itself. No mortgage, no credit card debt, no student loans, etc. That all needs to be gone once you retire. Private pensions sometimes have an option to borrow from them for various reasons. You should almost never do this. Right now interest rates are low so mortgages will generally give you decent rates, so even using your pension to buy property isn’t a great idea.
My mom came home today. As per normal, I got confused about the time and place. While I was generally pretty good at collecting my mom from the airport, I ended up showing up a bit late from time to time. And there was often mixups with alarm clocks or wake up calls that made my on-time pickups a bit miraculous. This time there was a mix-up in getting my mom’s ashes.
I had been using Pelican to manage this
site, but switched it to Hugo this week. My main
reason for this is that I want to learn Go and
Hugo is written in Go and uses Go
templates in themes and a few
other places. After having played with it for a few weeks, I thought
I’d share my impressions so far.
Quite often I find it useful to push to more than one repo. If a
repo is used for system configuration, I might have a central repo
github.com but also have it on the servers
it’s used to manage. It can also be useful for some code review
scenarios.