The Contradictory Feelings Thread

[Man in Space]

Tomorrow’s my birthday. I get to celebrate, but I’m also a year closer to the grave.

[Linguoboy]

Tomorrow’s my birthday. I get to celebrate, but I’m also a year closer to the grave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnT5JkGydVY

[Man in Space]

Tomorrow’s my birthday. I get to celebrate, but I’m also a year closer to the grave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnT5JkGydVY

Thank you for sharing this. TMBG is associated with some good memories that I haven’t had occasion to revisit in a while. You’ve given me a most wonderful birthday gift in posting this video.

[doctor shark]

More of doctor (vampire)shark's issues with relatives. Yay!

More: show

I'm planning a trip back to the US for Christmas, as I typically do: looking forward to kitten time, among other things. Especially in the past few years, my father has been pushing me more and more to visit him in south Tex-ass, which is quite a trek from North Carolina, where my mother lives and where "home" is (21 hours by car; about 3-5 hours' flying, and flight prices are almost as high as some of my coworkers like to be). The good thing is that, this year, a good friend in California (San Diego) invited me to visit, and given how horrendous the cross-country flights can be, it seems fairly reasonable to have a short stop-over in Texas on the way back from CA to NC, which I think shouldn't be too much of an issue for planning.

One of the reasons for my apprehension for visiting is my father's then-wife cancelled my visit the last time I tried to visit two days before I was due to fly, so $360 went down the drain. My mother rightly pointed that out, and it's still lingering in my mind and is a major reason for me being very apprehensive about the whole thing. This now-ex-wife is out of the equation, but there's a new fiancée... and she's not the flavor of the month I saw on my visit to Anarchy in the UK this April, so I have no idea what's going on, what to expect, how long of a visit to plan for, or if I should have an escape door in case things go south. I at least didn't want to throw anyone into the Thames on my visit to London, so there's that, but... yeah.

I've also gotten invited to my father's upcoming wedding in Texas in June. I'm actually even enthused about attending this event compared to the visit this winter, and the weather's not the only reason (though it is a major factor): the fact I'd be likely going on my own (without my brother) makes me very unnerved...

[Travis B.]

The good part: I got my SSD1306-based OLED screens faster than expected - and they came with the pins pre-soldered so I wouldn't have to do any soldering (which I majorly suck at). And I got much of my driver layer for controlling these displays already written (pretty much everything but code for flipping and rotating images, necessary for handling bitmaps in formats other than that used natively by the display), so it won't be long before I actually try these out.

The other part: These things are tiny as hell - yes, they say the diagonal dimension in the posting to buy them, but that never gives you an intuitive sense of really how small these things are. Also, I bought them through Amazon, and I tend to feel guilty when I buy stuff through them, but if I had purchased them from, say, Adafruit I would have had to buy them at a significant markup.

[Ryusenshi]

I have an itch to start playing tabletop RPGs again. Unfortunately I really don't have the time.

[Travis B.]

zeptoforth passed its multicore multitasking stress test - it did not fail its 1 1/2 day test run. Yet in a subsequent SD card FAT32 test I found it can really only read 35 KiB/s, which is horribly slow even for an MCU running at 125 MHz.

[Torco]

I just sued my... what's the word for padrastro... stepfather? you know, me mum's guy after she split with me dad.

It's a long and truculent story, featuring extensive wage theft, covid laws that allow you to neither fire not pay a worker, violation of said laws, failure to pay legal severance, and maternal betrayal. long story short, i'm owed quite a bit of dosh and, finally, I worked up the balls to just use lawyers to settle it.

This is happy because, well, besides getting a few gold coins it feels good to... I don't know, stand up for oneself? to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? but it also feels bad. guy was kind of family once... hell I used to go to watch football at the stadium with him, plus me mum's not gonna have it easy during this whole thing. this will possibly alienate me and her more, and I don't have that many years of having a living mum left anyway, so.... yeah, both happy and sad. contradictory feelings thread.

[Linguoboy]

I just sued my... what's the word for padrastro... stepfather? you know, me mum's guy after she split with me dad.

Yeah, "stepfather" is the word.

I remember you posting before about the wage theft issues. I'm glad you're getting some of what's owed to you. Hopefully your mother will eventually understand.

[Torco]

Thanks, hopefully it all goes well

[Travis B.]

This thing may seem silly to have contradictory feelings about...

The good: zeptoforth is starting to reach the "if you build it they will come" stage, which very many (probably most) Forths never reach. (For the record, Forth probably has the highest implementation-to-user ratio of all programming languages.)

The mixed: I now can't simply abandon this code and jump onto the next project that catches my fancy now that people are actually using it. I will likely be working on this for a very long time. I do have one other project at the present, zeptocom.js, but zeptocom.js exists specifically to make using embedded Forth, and particular zeptoforth, easy for the user.

[hwhatting]

The mixed: I now can't simply abandon this code and jump onto the next project that catches my fancy now that people are actually using it.

The curse of success. Now you'll know how these artists feel whose fans always want to hear that one hit song
Congratulations on creating something that people actually use, and to many more hits to come!

[Travis B.]

The mixed: I now can't simply abandon this code and jump onto the next project that catches my fancy now that people are actually using it.

The curse of success. Now you'll know how these artists feel whose fans always want to hear that one hit song
Congratulations on creating something that people actually use, and to many more hits to come!

Yeah, this morning I saw a message on GitHub of someone who had originally planned on writing their own Forth for the Pico for a project of theirs but who had decided that zeptoforth already had everything they wanted and more, so instead what they wanted was directions on how to customize zeptoforth to remove features that they did not need in order to save space on the Pico (as much of zeptoforth is modular, so if one is careful one can remove portions of it provided you do not leave behind anything dependent on them).

[Travis B.]

The good: I just solved a major outstanding bug in the handling of locks claimed by tasks of differing priority in zeptoforth.

The less good: My ESP8285 WiFi radio driver for the Wio RP2040 is just really unreliable, and I have not yet sorted out why respite practically three weeks of work on it by now.

[doctor shark]

Double-up:

More: show

(1) Outlook (which I've used for my personal e-mail in various iterations since 2004, starting with Hotmail) has gotten progressively more and more unusable, particularly with these "updates" they keep deploying for the web interface without any prior notice or warning! (Buttons move, buttons don't work, buttons disappear, glitchy and aggressive pop-ups, an influx of spam, toolbars that serve no useful function...) Bonus points is that I keep complaining that things don't work, but I've not heard any response from Microsquish Microsoft about the past six months' worth of complaints. And I've complained every day. As a result, I've taken the move finally to move my personal e-mail stuff to Gmail because it's really gotten out of hand for Outlook, but I can't do that with my work e-mail (as far as I know; "security" reasons). It's a strange feeling to be leaving a program I've been using in some manner or another for close to two decades, though...

More: show

(2) Last week, when my father called me at the usual inopportune times during my workday, he mentioned that the marriage he'd been planning to #3 in June got moved ahead. As in, he got married last week. I feel a bit strange that it just happened like that, though at least I didn't find out through my aunt on Facebook before he told me. They're also planning a trip to Europe in early fall for her birthday/a belated honeymoon, and I really have no idea what to expect from the upcoming trip, not least of all because I've never met her in person. This is also not the same person I met less than a year ago while I was in London, so...

[Raphael]

Whoa, that's pretty ... not sure what to call it.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It feels like it might be a portent of inconvenience, perhaps?

[Ares Land]

Double-up:

On the first one... I've watched Outlook change, over the years, into something worse than Lotus Notes, which is saying something.
On the second one... man, that's... weird. To say the least.

[MacAnDàil]

Myself, I am shifting dom gmail to protonmail because it is more secure and less of a major corporation.

[Raphael]

It's now about 24 hours since I discovered that I'm apparently too dumb to use a can opener. OK, I did get the can open in the end, but I doubt the way I did it was the way intended by the inventor of the can opener. Weird.