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improvised ballsiness
Friday, December 9 2016
This evening Nancy and Ray arrived a little after 6:30pm (well within my workday) as our ride to the evening's event: a celebration of Sarah the Vegan's birthday at the Garden Café. My premature removal from my work environment meant I had to pay special attention to my smartphone for nearly two more hours. I didn't have to end up contributing much into the various Slack threads (other than weighing in on the benefits of adding another postfix instance to an email server).
As I always at the Garden, I ordered the portobello panini sandwich, this time with triangles of tempeh instead of salad. Having ridden with Nancy & Ray, I had to depend on the Garden's own stock of hot sauce. The strongest they have is Melinda's, which was presented as a secret bottle that not just any customer is allowed to use. I really need to give them a bottle of Sontava habañero sauce so they can quit living in 2007.
Gretchen had baked a complicated "Brooklyn blackout cake" featuring a surface consisting of a whole crumbled layer that might have been in the cake had it not been crumbled (and applied with sticky adhesive layer of pudding). It's been years since I've eaten chocolate cake, and I wasn't going to start tonight. When Kate asked why I wasn't having any, I proclaimed that I don't like chocolate. She was mystified, to which I offered, "It's a little like you telling me you don't like masturbation, huh?"
As I've been doing for the past several years, I brought Sarah a present just from me. I hadn't had time to make her anything special, so I just took one of the many tiny paintings from my large collection and wrapped it up. It was the one of the rhino.
Later we all went to a newish bar/beer store called R&R Taproom near the intersection of 212 and 375. The place is a brightly-lit and feels a little more like a coffee shop than a beer/wine place, and when we arrived there was only one big table to sit around (though supposedly that was because of an earlier meeting). For our purposes, this wasn't a problem; our crowd was big. In addition to most of the people from Sarah's birthday celebration, we met up with Eva & Sandor (who had been eating at a separate table at the Garden), Susan & David, that guy who built Eva & Sandor's house, his girlfriend, and Jeremy, a West-Hurley-based web developer who works remotely with Eva at a famous multinational cosmetics company. Jeremy was talking to Ray and Sandor about the absurdly-high-bandwidth (200 megabit) internet now available along Route 28A. Evidently this was installed to serve the needs of NYC's DEP for their management of the Ashokan Reservoir. I told him that we're still in the 3 megabit broadband dark ages on Dug Hill Road, and went on to explain how this affects our media consumption. Because we can't get any streaming services to work with out internet connection, I'm forced to use Bittorrent to get all my media. I explained my set up using Transmission, and how I download my content to a server located somewhere in Europe. That server is cheap: five euros/month, big: 80 gigabytes of storage, has a fast connection, and it's outside the copyright umbrella of the United States. The files get to that server very quickly because of its high-bandwidth connection, and then I download them slowly to my local machine using Filezilla. Oddly, I pointed out, though no commercial services offer HD streaming support for our connection speed, I am able to start watching my content immediately once it's all reassembled from its Bittorrent pieces at the remote server, suggesting that it is possible to stream HD content with the quality of our connection. Sandor suggested that perhaps the requirements are no longer as high as they used to be, saying "Netflix recently lowered the specification for their streaming service." Meanwhile, Jeremy was intrigued by my complicated media-obtaining system. Even though he has access to much better bandwidth than I do, he seemed to like the improvised ballsiness of it all. It's like using a console versus doing things in a GUI, and it's natural that someone who writes code for a living would at least find it interesting.
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