Almost exactly two years ago, I changed to the Twenty Thirteen theme. It was a breath of fresh air after what I’d used before. The font is beautiful and it was much less cluttered than the themes I’d used before. One of the things I like is that the color scheme quickly tells the user what kind of post I’m making. In practice, the post types made a bit less sense for the way I blog than if I were a Tumblr refuge, but it does make for a nice, colorful theme.

…. but pretend there aren’t.

Main quote:

In some ways, this is so incredibly shortsighted. Here Sony is so committed to the idea that torrents can’t be shown to have any legal, non-infringing uses (even though there are plenty), that it won’t even allow its own staff to experiment with ways to use the new technology to their own advantage. But just the admission in the email alone shows that Sony’s top execs know damn well that there are legitimate, non-infringing, uses for BitTorrent, and they’re deliberately trying not to use them just to make BitTorrent look much worse than it is.

The lives lost are tragic, but the constant police misbehavior has an even worse effect on society. I came across the following today on an article about Stingrays:

Well, the supposed “good guys” (cops) no longer really care what is legal and what is not, so why should I?

Once this type of sentiment becomes entrenched, civil society is in danger. Just like paying taxes, we need people to believe in the social rules or the illusion comes crashing down.

Scarlett has become hardcore obsessed with the BBC show Octonauts. Nothing she used to care about - Mulan, My Little Pony, Beauty and the Beast - can be put on the television for her. All she wants to watch is Octonauts. So for Easter we got her all the characters. She has two favorite characters/toys: Shellington, a koala bear, and Kwazii, a cat descended from a long line of pirates. This is what Kwazii looks like:

Daddy, I have The Information! I got the pamphlet!

-Scarlett after grabbing a pamphlet at the bank

Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.

Looks like I was right about the non-commit and possibly also about the df -h.

Last night at the time I wrote the post:

# btrfs fi show /home
Label: 'Home1' uuid: 89cfd56a-06c7-4805-9526-7be4d24a2872
 Total devices 1 FS bytes used 1.91TiB
 devid 1 size 2.73TiB used 1.99TiB path /dev/sdb1

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 3.9G 600K 3.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 3.9G 976K 3.9G 1% /run
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3 146G 52G 87G 38% /
tmpfs 3.9G 296K 3.9G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 240M 126M 114M 53% /boot
/dev/sdb1 2.8T 2.0T 769G 73% /home
babyluigi.mushroomkingdom:/media/xbmc 1.8T 1.6T 123G 93% /media/nfs/xbmc-mount
babyluigi.mushroomkingdom:/fileshares 15G 6.5G 7.5G 47% /media/nfs/babyluigi
tmpfs 795M 28K 795M 1% /run/user/500

And today:

Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1) by Hugh Howey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hugh Howey does a masterful job in this book. It is definitely a contender for my favorite book of 2015. So much of what makes this book great is how Howey subverts all of our expectations. It is technically a dystopian book, but it is unlike any I’ve read before. One of the ways in which it’s unique, for example, is how the dystopian element is almost irrelevant to the story. I found early on that it reminded me of the video games Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus with many of its elements. The video games take place on a generation ship that’s had so many generations removed from its initial launch that some of its early history is viewed as perhaps just stories. Additionally, there’s the erasure of a previous uprising from the computers. There’s also a dictator-like government masquerading as a democracy. That’s not to say that it’s entirely irrelevant to the story. After all, it is essentially the MacGuffin, in a way, setting the story into motion. But the story is more a character study than a treatise on the dystopia.

Because of grad school, my work on Snap in Time has been quite halting - my last commit was 8 months ago. So I haven’t finished the quarterly and yearly culling part of my script. Since I’ve been making semi-hourly snapshots since March 2014, I had accumulated something like 1052 snapshots. While performance did improve a bit after I turned on the autodefrag option, it’s still a bit suboptimal, especially when dealing with database-heavy programs like Firefox, Chrome, and Amarok. At least that is my experience - it’s entirely possible that this is correlation and not causation, but I have read online that when btrfs needs to figure out snapshots and what to keep, delete, etc it can be a performance drag to have lots of snapshots. I’m not sure, but I feel like 1052 is a lot of snapshots. It’s certainly way more than I would have if my program were complete and working correctly.

1. I Fight Dragons (179 plays) - Over this quarter I have continued to really enjoy the B Side to The Near Future and listened to them a lot after work. Scarlett likes quite a few of those songs as well.

2. Anberlin (74 plays) - For the concert last year I put all their albums on my phone. So when I listen to my music already on the phone, Anberlin comes up a lot.