Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finally caught up with all the others on my feed and read this book. I don’t know if it was part of some book club or if it just spiraled as each person I follow recommended it to each other. This is another book from s book bundle I’d bought (I think Humble Bundle).

This was an example of one of times where the book cover kept me from reading it earlier rather than encouraging me to read it. The title “Uglies” together with a sheet over someone’s head and the blue fingernails; I thought it was going to be some teen drama book or something I wouldn’t enjoy. Instead I found a YA dystopia that kept me glued to the page. As a testament to Mr Westerfeld’s writing ability, although I had fun pointing out dystopia tropes in my status updates, he proves that tropes are not necessarily bad by incorporating them in an exciting way. So, if you’re familiar with dystopias (particularly of the YA variety) you’ll be familiar with the story beats, but not necessarily with the execution.

I updated Rawhide and ended up with this login screen. I like it - I think mostly because of the font.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first time I’ve read this book. Until now I’d only read The Hitchhiker’s Guide series. It definitely has a different tone to it while still being a very British and funny book at its core. That might have to do with the fact that it was originally an unused Dr Who script or it might just be that Mr Adams was writing in a different universe with a different tone. There’s definitely something very modern in a sort of 80s or 90s way about this book - the way it talks about computers and algorithms that we just don’t talk about nowadays. We take PCs for granted, but Adams, like Richard, was a computer geek when that was still a pretty new thing.

It’s pretty crazy how much Scarlett has grown since she first started going to Coney Island. Before, there were only a few rides she liked or could go on. Now she’s going on roller coasters! I wonder if she’ll want to go on adult coasters with me when she’s old enough. I guess we’ll see what thinks about being twisted and turned about.

Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:

I was surprised I was able to get a decent fireworks shot with my cell. Of course, compared to my DSLR, it was a lot more random and i had a lot more crap shots that I couldn’t use than I get with my DSLR where I have exact control of f-stop, shutter speed, etc.

Back when I first was working on replacing my Pogoplug (the original BabyLuigi), I was looking at potentially using it to learn about Docker in addition to creating virtual machines that were actually useful instead of just playing around with VMs for looking at Linux distros. The benefit of Docker was to have the isolation of VMs without the overhead of VMs. Also, since it was trending pretty hard, I figured it’d be good for my career to have some experience with it. So I spent a few weeks researching Docker and playing around with some of the online demos. I read lots about how it was used and how to avoid the usual pitfalls. But in the end I went with a VM that did a bit more than I wanted; I’d wanted to separate services so that updating one thing wouldn’t cause me to lose everything. However, the more I looked into it, the more it looked like unnecessary headache without enough of a benefit. Dockers were SO isolated that if you wanted to run a LAMP stack you had to run at least 3 Docker containers and find a way to string them together and have a separate pool of storage they could all access.