After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:

1. Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
2. Context menus would appear in the wrong place and I actually filed a bug about this one.
3. I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)

I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.

After spending the last year and change filling in the holes in the MxPx discography from when I last was an active fan with 2000’s The Ever Passing Moment, I have arrived at the final full album I was missing, Plans within Plans. I still have a couple EPs to buy, but this will probably be the last MxPx album review I write until they release their next album. As we went through the discography we saw the band evolve a bit and, either under label pressure or from wanting to explore musically, seem to veer into the territory of bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. Plans Within Plans is MxPx finally coming full circle towards their original sound while also having evolved since their early albums. To me, this album sounds like MxPx just being MxPx, not sounding like any other band. They’ve learned and grown and both the music and lyrics reflect that, but they’ve come to appreciate who they really are as a band. This was one of those albums that took a few listens for me to truly appreciate. Onto the tracks.

I upgraded to Fedora 36 so I wanted to see all the latest updates to Wayland. I’d been reading about the updates in the KDE and wanted to see if it was more stable. I had to redo my latte dock profile. Other than that, SO FAR the only issues are that the scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls WAY too far on the page, making it almost useless. And Yakuake (the KDE drop down terminal) appears at the middle of the screen instead of at the top. I went to file a bug, but I saw a comment that this is fixed in the next version of Yakuake, so it seems I just need to wait for an update. Otherwise, so far it seems to be working OK.

Before Race Day

Ready for the Race!

I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.

A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.

Earlier this morning I came across this tweet by Mary Fan, an author I met at the Farpoint convention and whose books I quite enjoy:

I just realized I’ve been speaking on diversity panels for 7 years.

— Mary Fan 🐲 范诗蓉 (@AstralColt) May 5, 2022

I gave a short reply, but I felt Twitter was inadequate to truly express myself. Of course, Diversity Panels have been around long enough that by 1997’s Chasing Amy (source of the header image), they were already making jokes about how some folks were always relegated to the Diversity Panel (click to play):

This week Our Opinions Are Correct aired an episode about the Illusion of Change. They do an excellent job explaining what it is - when long-running fiction (comics, Soap Operas, etc) has to eventually return to the status quo. They cover infamous examples like that time that Satan dissolved the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Finally, the hosts cover the biggest reason the corporations that own Marvel and DC always resort to the status quo: so that folks jumping onto the series don’t have to deal with 50-100 years of backstory in order to understand what’s going on with the characters now.

In March I went back to Advent of Code 2016. In an effort not to get stuck, I decided to go as far as I can in Python before going back around and working on the other languages. So I did days 6 and 7 in Python. Overall, relatively easy Regex problems.

And that’s it. It was not a big month for programming. I mostly focused on playing with the kids and cooking. May/June are looking like they’re going to contain quite a bit more programming, at least relatively speaking. I’m hoping to both get back to work on some of my projects and also get back to Advent of Code.

Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.

This time around I’ve written a Python script to take the OPML file from Podcast Republic and generate the list along with URLs and official descriptions for all the podcasts. If I have additional thoughts I’ll add them after the official description.

The World Around Us

99% Invisible - Official Description: Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.