Thanks to having Scarlett be the first photo with a color checker that has a white balance section, I was able to get the lighting and white balance perfect in that photo and then copy those settings to the other photos. After that, just a few tweaks to get each photo perfect. Allowed me to make the most of my limited time. Enjoy the photos!

I discovered The Bugle from an AV Club post about podcasts. It was a very British approach to satirizing the news. At the time it was hosted by Jon Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Then Oliver hit it big with Last Week Tonight and didn’t have time to participate in The Bugle anymore. While Andy Zaltzman was trying to figure out how he was going to relaunch the show, he played clips from his standup show Satirize This. People email him things they want satirized and he does it. I grew to really, really enjoy it and so when I heard he was actually coming to America, I knew I had to jump on the opportunity to see him live.

One in a long string of photos I’ll be pulling out when they’re preteens or teens and constantly bickering.

Just a photo to showcase Scarlett’s new haircut. But when I saw it a month later, I really liked how it looked.

Here in Maryland, Howard County has a bumper sticker you see on almost all the cars - it’s basically that green sign on the top right (without the deplorable thing, of course). So when I saw this, I was blown away at the awesome creative nature of the situation. It’s a nice bit of humor in what’s been a horrible election.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Well, good. don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best.”

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, that was a great little read. If you were worried John Scalzi was a one-trick pony, worry no more. This thriller is a great little romp through a world in which no one dies anymore…or at least, can’t be murdered. Scalzi does a bunch of great world-building in which he shows us what happens to a world in which you effectively can’t die because of murder anymore. It’s alternately bitingly witty and a little sobering. I’m not entirely sure if I want more stories in this universe or if it’s best that you just have this little tidbit before things fall apart from too much introspection.

Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:

lxc-ls

That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:

lxc-start -n lemmy -d

As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:

lxc-console -n lemmy

That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:

Once kids learn how to open doors, drawers, etc - it’s all they do. Overall, it’s not too bad - they’re learning how the world works, gaining physical skills, etc. But unless you’ve child-proofed the crap out of every single thing that can be opened, it becomes very easy for the kids to make a mess. Since they are (as of late September/early October) currently obsessed with opening their drawers, we practically never play with them in their rooms.

Once again just assigning intention to some random toddler stuff, but I just love how he looks like he just heard his favorite team won the World Series, or something.