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into the pubic domain
Saturday, November 15 2014
This morning after a brief weekly coffee thing in the living room in front of a blazing fire in the woodstove, Gretchen and I went to the Wall Street house to show it to two different parties who had responded to advertisements placed on Craigslist. The first of these were a couple of young guys from New Paltz. One was a school teacher and another did some vague internet-related job from wherever he happened to be. The other was a woman that Gretchen had hoped would be half of a lesbian couple. But the latter didn't seem to think she could make the small bedroom work and the two guys were really excited about the house. I was a little nervous that one was a musician who intended to set up the basement as a music studio; I didn't want noise complaints from the neighbors. But it turned out that he's a keyboardist (also, he's the school teacher) and Gretchen seemed to love these guys, so I was onboard as we casually handed over a set of keys and allowed them to move in starting today even though they'd yet to sign a contract. I'm not sure how that happened, and I would have preferred to proceed a little more formally, but I guess I was caught up in Gretchen's enthusiasm. Also, it was great to have a tenant willing to pay the rent being asked.
Mark (of Mark & Maresa) showed up and took Gretchen to Albany for something called Veggiefest, and I returned home to fritter away my afternoon in an offhand way. I'd recently been reminded of the movie Snakes on a Plane (reading a perverted-justice.com chatlog, actually), so I'd impulsively downloaded it and this afternoon I watched most of it. I knew that central premise was that snakes would terrorize an airplane, but I was curious what the setup for that would be. What would it be like on the ground before the plane took off? As it happened, Snakes on a Plane is a significantly more complicated than I expected, and it's actually not a terrible movie, unless you factor in the grossly misleading portrayal of serpents at its heart.
Later, I did something I've been meaning to do for awhile now. I wrote a script (executed regularly as a Windows task) that scans through the multilevel hierarchy of the podcast download directory that is filled by my podcatching software and copies the latest podcasts into a single flat directory, greatly simplifying the process of copying those files to an MP3 player. I actually wrote the script so that it would create two directories: one with the last fortnight of podcasts, and another with the last month of podcasts. Because I always write these Windows file system scripts in VBScript (the first computer language I mastered as an adult), I wrote this one in that computer language as well. But it had been so long since I'd last written anything substantial in BASIC, I actually had to refresh my knowledge by looking up the syntax of things like an If-Then conditional. If you would like to use this script yourself, I am releasing it into the pubic domain. The pubic domain is different from the public domain in that I can (at some point) claw it back if need be. Or so I'm saying right now.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?141115 feedback
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