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too expensive at the thrift store
Sunday, December 10 2017
I spent another day obsessed with the Google Maps Javascript API, extending a JSON spec I'd already developed to provide instructions for how data is to be rendered graphically on charts.js. There are lots of things that can be done with a Google Map, and by the end of the day I was even using an HTML color manipulation library (similar to such libraries I wrote for myself in the late 90s) called tinyColor to use data in a recordset to dynamically alter colors.
I took a little break in the afternoon to make a run out to the Tibetan Center thrift store. There was a Sony PRS-300 eBook reader there that seemed like something fun to potentially hack. I hadn't gotten it on Friday because that woman there who tends to charge too much for unlabeled electronics was working there. When I went back today, she was working there again. So I said fuck it and added it to my pile (which also included some L-shaped metal brackets, a plastic organic molecule modeling kit, and a Skil plunge router). The woman working the cash register did what I most feared she would do: she went online and looked up the eBook reader on eBay. When she announced a price of $25, I did something I have never done before: I said that the price was too high and that I didn't want it. The woman didn't argue or attempt to barter. I got the rest of the items for something like $8.
At 7:00pm, Gretchen was back from the bookstore, and we loaded up the dogs and drove down to Ray & Nancy's place for the birthday bash of Sarah the Vegan, who was turning 49. More people showed up for it than expected: Eva & Sandor, Joe (Kate's boyfriend), and Jeff & Alana. There was an unusal amount of alcohol on hand (at least by recent standards). I started out with a not-very-good Fat Dog Imperial Oatmeal Stout and quickly switched to red wine. Later I had a mango-chili margarita from a blender jar Joe had brought. By the end of the evening I was drinking tiny iced shots of Maker's Mark. I had an unusually good time, though I wasn't crazy about the food. As always, Ray had done all the cooking. Dinner featured many different members of the family Cruciferæ in various forms (in salad or baked in an oven) and a main course of glurpy polenta. Dessert came in the form of birthday cupcakes Gretchen had made.
After dinner, we sat around the table mostly building up to punchlines that released gales of laughter. The only time things got reasonably serious was when we briefly talked about the ongoing effort to expose gropers and serial sexual predators in our society. I worried that the backlash, particularly if the standard to demand strong corroboration for such accusations corrodes. It all kind of reminds me of witch hunts, the red scare, and the ritual satanic abuse scare of the 1980s. The retort to this observation is always, "But this time it's real." But that's always how these things are at the beginning. What you have to worry about is where things go from here.
Towards the end of the evening, Gretchen started giving me funny looks every time I refilled my glass, so I stopped doing it except when she wasn't looking (or had Ray do it for me once we'd moved on to bourbon).
I'm not sure how my weird cat emoji thing went over. Nice things were said, of course, but I could tell (for example) that it wasn't the sort of thing that Gretchen would've liked. She's not a big fan of my creepier stuff, and there's something inherently creepy about an anthropomorphic cat face.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171210 feedback
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