Zompist Bboard Again

Things have been a bit mixed in the garden recently. A very late frost after a very warm spring wiped out the growth of the grape vines, potatoes, various ornamentals like jasmine, and even some of the leaves of the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Most things will recover, but there might not be any grapes this year.

But there's also reasons to be happy! Today the first rose of the year opened in the sunny, sheltered front garden. It's a Darcey Bussell, a variety bred by David Austin, with crimson flowers. I have a lot of Austin roses, or "English" roses as he modestly called them, mostly because they cope better with a no spray regime than many, often have good scent, and I like the very classic old rose form.

Another reason to be happy is the medlars in full bloom, and it's looking like it'll be a good year for medlars, which can be a bit temperamental. I'm not sure if people here know what a (European) medlar is, since they're not a common fruit nowadays and at best grown by a few gardeners as ornamentals. The medlar is a member of the pome (apple, pear, quince) family of fruits, which produces small, hard, brown fruit. It was commonly grown in Shakespeare's day, and also the butt of many jokes because of its shape and how it's eaten. It has a puckered dent in it that is very ... suggestive, giving rise to nicknames like "open arse fruit", and it's not edible until it's incredibly ripe. People say you have to eat it "rotten", but this isn't true, you just eat it when it's over-ripe, a bit like a squishy apple or pear. But the taste.... it's like apple puree with a hint of cinnamon and lemon juice. I love them so much I planted two trees.

Here's what the open arse fruit looks like in the autumn:



EDIT: I call it the European medlar to differentiate it from the the loquat, which people sometimes also call medlar, but actually its origin is Middle Eastern. It's been cultivated in Europe as well since the ancient Greeks and Romans though.

I yesterday got numbered labels for B branches (rather than named labels for BL branches) working in zeptoforth, which I am really happy about (and it took far less effort to implement than I expected). In "gas" mode it should now generate assembly that could be fed into an actual assembler (e.g. gas).

Well, long story short I have my trip to Oklahoma for the Norman Music Festival booked. They postponed it until August due to the coronavirus, and I figured I may as well go seeing as I would have missed it the first time even had there not been the coronavirus.

I just saw a goldfinch for the first time in a while. It perched right next to our conservatory window.

Got my residence permit, so now I'm legally resident in the Netherlands until 2022! And I may actually be able to start half-time work in the lab next week, which I'm looking forward to... it's been two months of "stay-at-home", which really isn't fun. Especially for an experimentalist.

Got my output capture test functionality working for zeptoforth, so now as part of unit tests I can test for the output of code. Best of all, this is multitasking-friendly, so this can be used to test code in multiple tasks simultaneously.

I just purchased a Numworks calculator, which seems like a great piece of hardware, and furthermore I have the Mecrisp-Stellaris (a Forth implementation similar to zeptoforth) port for the Numworks calculator, and I am going to see if I can incorporate the portable portions into zeptoforth, so I can get zeptoforth working on the Numworks calculator, which would be neat.

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 9:43 am

elemtilas wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:18 pm For anyone here into worldbuilding, I'm pleased to announce that I've uploaded a new revision of the great Ethnographical Questionnaire.

Thanks, I've always really appreciated this.

Wonderful!

I hope you'll find this version at least as useful as the old!

Release 0.6.0 of zeptoforth is out! Now zeptoforth comes with a wordlist capability, albeit not a traditional Forth-79-style one per se.

One of the neighbours just got an English bulldog puppy and we're all kind of losing our minds over it.

I just beat the Radiance, a nice crowning achievement to 57 hours of Hollow Knight. No, I'm not doing the pantheons and maybe I'll do Grimm. But I'm very satisfied and ready for Silksong (whenever it comes out)

My coat of arms, as registered with the American College of Heraldry, appeared in the quarterly newsletter today.

With some very generous and thoughtful support from my parents, recognising that I've lost a huge amount of prospective income due to Covid-19 with no recourse to government support, I've finally sorted enough funding to be able to confidently pick up my postgraduate studies again in September. Even though most of it will be online initially, after so much time worrying about whether or not it will be possible, I'm more relieved and excited than I can say.

It's hard to accept generous offers of financial support, especially when as a family we grew up with the opposite of lots of money. After finishing my undergrad I watched with deliberately distanced interest friends go into postgrad courses with their family's support, feeling glad for them but also that the class system was very much alive in our society, never imagining I might be in that position one day. Then government postgrad loans came in: but they only go to £10,000, not enough to cover fees for many Masters courses. I had to leave my first bout of postgrad study early because I had used all my government loan on only two thirds of the fees and hadn't been able to secure external funding.

Now my parents have inherited, things are different, but still it feels very strange to accept such a gift. I am just so deeply grateful that they decided to help me, as even though I got a scholarship and bursary, without this support I wouldn't have been able to take the place as the costs are still very high.

Feeling very lucky and very grateful, in short! And even though I've experienced my share of poverty, mindful of talented and hard-working people who are less fortunate.

[duplicate post]

Congratulations!

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Jun 24, 2020 9:06 am Congratulations!

Thanks!

My procedure went off without a hitch yesterday and I can eat again. (Mom made me mashed potatoes—my favorite!)

Great!

I got my basic math routines for zeptoforth working, so I now have EXP, LN, SQRT, F**, SIN, COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, ATAN2, SINH, COSH, TANH, ASINH, ACOSH, and ATANH working! To mark this occasion, I released a minor-version release 0.7.0.

sasasha wrote: ↑Wed Jun 24, 2020 5:16 am postgraduate studies

Congrats! That's fantastic!



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On an unrelated note:

Finding a leftover tortilla chip under your desk from lunch = win.

It's the little things in life.