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.

Tithe by Holly Black

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another book from that Humble Bundle that had a bunch of Simon and Schuster YA books. This book was OK. Not my cup of tea, but not bad. As I said in my status updates, Ms Black is pretty good at subverting my expectations. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

For someone who could not really care less about “the fey” as fairies are apparently called, especially if they’re spelled “faerie”, I’ve ended up with a lot of fey books via various bundles. So there are lots of tropes I’m not familiar with, like the fact that faeries are apparently deathly allergic to iron. Why is that? Does it have to do with why we don’t see faeries now? Because of the iron age of humans? Luckily, this book was written for people were a little less familiar because it explained things like changelings, kupies, and the iron allergy.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It has been very interesting reading this book. As someone who started reading SF in the 80s, I’ve read my share of American Cold War SF. But I’ve never read a full length Chinese SF novel. As I’ve often commented, what’s interesting with other cultures is seeing where we’re similar and where we’re different. For example, Da Shi, the cop, is similar to a detective cop in a American fiction. That makes sense - a detective is essentially an amateur psychologist. And humans are very similar in a lot of ways, including in the way in which criminals think. Some of the differences in the way the characters think or act defy an easy characterization, but showcase how our cultures think differently.

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, I’m done….I’m caught up. What a journey this has been. If one of the previous books was about the fallout from the War of Five Kings upon the smallfolk of Westeros, this book was about the fallout among the prominent families and rules of the kingdoms. It looks like everything is now ready for the climax of book 6 and denouement of book 7.

Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though I’m older than the author of this book, I have a different, though similar, relationship with this game. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up or because my parents were (at the time) struggling to make ends meet, but I completely missed the marketing blitz of SMB3. I only heard of The Wizard a decade or more later.

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book as part of a Humble Bundle. This book wasn’t the reason I bought the bundle. I avoided it for a long time because the cover made it look like something I wasn’t going to enjoy - perhaps a romance or paranormal romance. But two things made me start reading it:

1. I’d read a romance by Marjorie Liu last year and it wasn’t horrible. I wouldn’t actively seek them out, but apparently they’re not all cheesy bodice rippers.

Civilization V (2 hrs)

https://youtu.be/FNgKcM7jf6k?list=PLEJrELYLxNgVwd6MWpI64II_fu14o3KpB

A few more turns in our multi-player games.

Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)

https://youtu.be/pV8-jgg1G6Y?list=PLEJrELYLxNgWsp76cFb5sqedFrKP9qQLw

I decided to play a little more and work on creating an overlay that allows the game to be full screen while also still presenting my Extra Life information. After a of couple tries, I like where it ended up.

Vertical Drop Heroes (2 hrs)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEJrELYLxNgXBv5HxeZNUxg5AWWM9QGJb

I thought this was just going to be a quick Eric Checks Out, but it turned out to get me really addicted to the point where I wish I was playing it every night before bed. Of all the rogue-likes I’ve played, I feel like this one gets the best mix of allowing you to die without it hurting too much.

Scarlett really likes setting up her Calico critter houses, and I thought it was set up very nicely, so one day I did a photo shoot:

Then Scarlett got the really big house, so I took some more photos of her setup:

I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.