The Autumn Republic by Brian McClellan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s the conclusion to the Powder Mage Trilogy and so things generally move fast once we get past the first few chapters that catch us up to where everyone has ended up since the end of book 2. Each chapter definitely left me wanting to continue reading. For that reason I forbade myself from reading at night because I knew I’d end up reading too late into the night.

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading Maskerade, the rating remains a 3/5 stars

We have another outing with the Lancre Witches. Pratchett moves us from parodies of Shakespeare to a parody of Phantom of the Opera. In true Pratchett fashion, this is not really the point of the narrative. Instead it’s about the silliness of Opera and about Agnes Nitt finding herself. I believe Anges was a bit character in the last Witches story - part of the emo-coven that the older witches found so silly. She’s moved to Anhk-Morpork to be out of Granny Weatherwax’s influence and joins the Opera. Nanny, noticing that witches have to exist in triplets - “the maid, the mother, and the….other one” - contrives to find another witch in Lancre. Unfortunately, there aren’t any maidens to be found in Lancre. And so Granny and Nanny head out to Anhk-Morkpork to provide comic relief while Agnes has her story.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a Kickstarter backer on this book/audiobook

I think there’s a side novella or short story I haven’t read in the Little Brother series/universe, but as far as I know, this is the first one that isn’t from Marcus Yallow’s perspective. Instead, this one is from Masha Maximov’s point of view. She was mostly an antagonist to him in the previous books, although meant to be a sympathetic one vs her bosses at DHS, or whatever agency she was working at.

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.

August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!

Amortization

I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.

I’ve attended a few of Michael Kennedy’s Python courses over at TalkPython.fm. He’s a great instructor and he really knows his Python. (As well he should, as host of Talk Python and co-host of Python Bytes) His usual courses at Talk Python are pre-recorded and I believe this was Michael’s first time doing an online live class under the Talk Python banner. (Before the pandemic, I think Michael would conduct live, in-person classes for companies)

It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.

I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.

The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.

I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).

I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.

A week ago Stella asked me, “Daddy, why is China fighting Ukraine?”

I told her, “No, China isn’t fighting Ukraine. Russia is fighting Ukraine.”

She thought for a moment and she asked, “Russia wants to take over Ukraine?”

After I answered in the affirmative she asked, “If Ukraine wins the war, does that mean they get to take over Russia?”

After I let her know that wasn’t the case, I did think about how it certainly seems fair play. If losing means losing your country, shouldn’t winning mean that you win the other’s country? And there have certainly been wars like that in the past, but I don’t think any modern wars have followed that pattern.