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glorious anthems and other great songs
Thursday, November 29 2018
At noon today I went to my favorite source of burritos in "Greater New England" (that is, everything east of the Hudson River). Being hand-assembled, burritos vary in quality. The problem with today's burrito was chiefly structural; it fell apart with over 20% left to be eaten, and I was forced to eat that part with a fork like some sort of chump.
On the walk back to work, I became aware of my third cat in the Village of Red Hook, this one being a black and white "tuxedo" cat on Fisk Street. He/she didn't come up to me to say hello, but he/she did watch me from a safe distance as I strolled past that house with all the hand-painted Delgado signs (as well as a small shrine for Heather Heyer, the woman killed by a car in Charlottesville's alt-right protest of 2017).
This afternoon I explored another possible way for building that stand-alone app that I am to build: as a C# app. I fired up VIsualStudio and followed a tutorial, building a form in .xaml and then reading values from it using code that didn't look too different from HTML and Javascript. I've been put off by C#'s arcane special-character-heavy extensions to C++, but for most C# projects, the code is probably a lot simpler. Indeed, there are those who think the whole Microsoft development environment is so braindead that they count it against developers who put it on their resume. That makes sense to me.
As i worked today, I listened mostly to the music of Car Seat Headrest, a lofi post-punk band active since 2010. I'd been intrigued by a few of their songs, which sounded like mumbly progressive rock. I'm particularly taken by their album Teens Of Denial, which is full of hooks, energy, and even the occasional harmony. RIght now "1937 State Park" is my favorite song, though this album is full of glorious anthems and other great songs.
Back home, I finally got around to making some important improvements to Woodchuck, my main desktop computer. I wanted to replace one of the monitors with that big Apple Cinema Display, but to do that I needed a videocard with a DisplayPort output. I had such a card, but to install that in Woodchuck, I needed a power supply with an extra connector designed to support such cards. Yesterday I'd taken delivery of such a power supply, so the first task was to swap out the old power supply (which has served me well and will probably end up in some other computer). Once that was in place and the computer still worked, I installed the new videocard, a massive Nvidia GTX 770 given to me (like the cinema display) by Sandor. Somewhat surprisingly, it worked immediately upon my first attempt. I suppose I should've been less surprised, because I'd already installed the drivers during an unsuccessful prior attempt (the one where I learned that I definitely needed those extra power supply cables). When I checked this new video card using the GPU information program GPU-Z, I found that in most measures it is ten times more powerful than the other videocard in Woodchuck, an Nvidia GeForce GT 430, which had been the most powerful videocard I own.
I didn't get around to attaching the Cinema Display to this setup, partly because my homemade multi-monitor desk probably cannot physically support it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181129 feedback
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