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Chinese food suitable for trick-or-treaters
Tuesday, January 10 2017
I can usually tell that a story is a big one if it suddenly starts getting mentioned by either Gretchen or my friends & colleagues (not including Sara Poiron), none of whom (with the exception of Sara) are as addicted to news as I am (even in this depressingly-Trumpified post-election period). An earlier example of my judging the size of a news story this way was when the infamous Trump "pussy grab" tape came out, and Gretchen called me about it from Manhattan, where she and her friend Wendy were glued to CNN watching the lurid coverage. I learned about the size of today's story (a weakly-sourced story about Russian intelligence having covertly-recorded video of Donald Trump gleefully watching prostitutes urinate in a bed once slept in by the Obamas in a Moscow Hotel) from posts about it on Slack between the new guy Dan and my boss Da. Da was particularly delighted about the existence of a new hastag, "#PEETUS."
Meanwhile Michæl (of Carrie & Michæl) came over and dropped off Penny and then he and Gretchen (just the two of them) went out for Chinese food at Chinese Gourmet, that weirdly-architectural restaurant where we celebrated our last Jewish Christmas. I politely asked that they bring me back something, and they did when they returned. It was sesame fried tofu with vegetables, which Michæl characterized as "good Chinese junk food." I ate a piece of tofu and it was so sweet that I commented that "you could hand it out to kids on Halloween."
After drinking a beer with Michæl in front of a blazing woodstove in the living room, Gretchen had us come downstairs to her library so she could bounce libary renovation ideas around. We don't normally heat that floor, so temperatures were probably in the 40s (Fahrenheit). Just so long as Gretchen avoid obviously terrible ideas (like painting the plastic floor tiles), I'm not that interested in the details of her renovation. So while Michæl and Gretchen talked, I measured and cut a couple tiles, completing a single line of them to the previously-unfloored northeast corner of the room. As I worked, though, I realized that it would be nearly impossible to continue the floor by inserting tiles into the fringey staggered-edge now present in the middle of the floor. Because of the way the edges hook together, you have to be able to raise the inserted tile up out of the plane of the floor, but that's impossible when you're trying to insert into a space surrounded on three sides with existing tile. It looks like I will have to partially tear the floor apart and rebuild it. Since most of the work involved in the installation is measuring and cutting, this won't actually add appreciably to the size of the job.
I've been trying to prepare a Windows 10 tablet-cum-keyboard (an RCA Cambio W101 V2) for use as a small on-the-road administrative workstation. But today I ran into snags. The Settings panel was failing to launch, so that meant I had to undo some of changes I'd made to its stock conditions. But in doing that, somehow the infernal trackpad behavior called "tapping" reappeared, and, for me, "tapping" is a deal breaker; I can't use a trackpad where clicks can happen without haptic feedback (which, with trackpad buttons, is provided mechanically). But in trying to get rid of tapping, I managed to get rid of the screen's touch sensitivity. I don't really use that when I have a keyboard and a trackpad, but it sure would be nice to have. So then I tried restoring the tablet to its factory settings, assuming it would behave like a similar function in a Chromebook. It did not. It left the tablet in a state where it booted to a certain point and then displayed an error message. This problem led me down a path I would've preferred not to go, and I learned about the new uefi firmware that has replaced the old BIOS one in devices such as the Cambio tablet (this was the first I'd ever heard of it). None of this really helped me though because I couldn't get the damn tablet to boot off a DVD drive, and all deep experience with earlier Windows computers was of limited use. Eventually, though, I got it to boot a Debian installation, suggesting there was some hope I would get the damn thing operational eventually. But Debian couldn't detect any network interfaces, suggesting I would probably need some version of Windows 10 to make the tablet usable (at least the way I want to use it). I should mention that the RCA site provides terrible support; their idea of providing a way to get drivers is by giving me a mailto link where I can ask that a driver be emailed to me. But then of course any emails sent to that address bounced, so, yeah! I guess RCA, like General Electric and Hoover Vacuums, has given up on its brand. Fucking with that stupid $50 tablet ended up keeping me up past 3:00am.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170110 feedback
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