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turtle on the road to a repaired mouth
Friday, July 12 2019
I didn't go to work today because I had a 10:00am appointment at the dentist to install a replacement for the crown that had fallen off one of my molars (the one nearest my top right wisdom tooth) and disintegrated. Since getting a temporary crown, another crown had fallen off my "punk rock" incisor (one I'd had to superglue back in as recently as June 14th), and (as you may recall) I couldn't find it for a day and was forced to use an old ill-fitting crown. On top of that, I recently experienced a serious flare up of canker sores, one of which (in my right cheek) still persists. So my mouth has been an uncomfortable wreck for over a month. On the drive north up Dug Hill Road, I stopped the Prius because there was a snapping turtle in the road. He or she was heading from west to east, and when he or she saw me walking towards him or her, he or she turned and headed back west. I hurried the turtle along with a stick (I was not going to risk getting bitten), and when he or she got to the side of the road, there was a concrete cliff around a culvert that he or she just pushed him or herself off of. The turtle landed belly-side up then quickly righted him or herself. I'm hoping that the next attempt to cross the road will take advantage of the culvert.
The turtle on Dug Hill Road, at 41.9590367N, 74.1179457W.
Click to enlarge.
The dentist's waiting room reminded me of why I love the Hudson Valley. Everybody there seemed to know everybody else, and most of the people waiting were musicians, like the dentist himself. The dentist came out between patients briefly to play a few bars of "You Don't Always Get What You Want," on the electric piano that is there in the waiting room among the statues of the Buddha. A little before that, I'd been discussing laughing gas (as well as helium suicide and glue huffing) with two of the patients.
Before the dentist started working on me, I quickly related to him that my incisor crown had also fell off and that, before I'd been able to find it, I'd attached an older ill-fitting crown. "Don't yell at me," I said, before saying that the adhesive I'd used had been superglue. But he just smiled and said, no problem, that that would've been what he would've suggested had I asked. The ill-fitting crown was perhaps glued a bit too well, but the dentist was able to pop it off using just the power of his thumb. He reattached the better-fitting crown with the kind of glue that requires ultraviolet light, though the new molar crown used some other sort of adhesive. My mouth felt much improved after these fixes.
As you might expect, I made a celebratory visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where the only thing I bought was a $2 hand-cranked flashlight (who knows what use I might make of the generator in that thing). From there, I drove to Kingston mostly to re-up my liquor cabinet at J&K's (because the liquor store in Red Hook doesn't seem to sell half gallons of cheap gin).
While doing further experiments with the web page that controls the speakerbot, I learned the reason I'd been unable to record audio using the Google Chrome browser (it had worked in Firefox, though I'd still had a different problem, one that garbled data when transferring the recorded audio to the speakerbot, which functions in this application as a LAMP-stack server). In its wisdom, Google has decided not to support media capture (specifically navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia) on web pages not served via https because they are "not secure." What makes this annoying is that in my application, all the web pages and servers are communicating on a local network, where I don't care whether or not anything is secure. I prefer to use Chrome, but if I want this to work, I have to use Firefox. I'm certainly not going go through the bother of buying and installing https certificates on my Raspberry Pis. The whole point of using Raspberry Pis is that they're cheap and straightforward to use. Similarly, I don't see why I should have to install https certificates on Asecular.com in order to avoid getting "not secure" warnings on my web pages when viewed in Google Chrome. This site consists of text documents, and there's no reason for me to go through the bother of making it "secure." But Google not only tells people my pages are insecure in Chrome, it also penalizes search results that point to my pages because it has made a decision to do so, thinking that nudging people to stop using http will make the web somehow more "secure." But what it really is doing is adding another barrier to entry for those wanting to participate in the web, a process that should be easier, not harder (this is partly why I am so discouraged by how complicated web development has become). And though I'm being penalized, I am so loathe to participate in their idea of what the web should be that I do not. It wouldn't take much more of this sort of thing to nudge me away from Chrome entirely. Indeed, tonight I downloaded Chromium for Windows. Chromium is the open-source version of Google Chrome, a version not entirely controlled by Google. That might seem like a small (and perhaps meaningless) distinction, but it's enough of one for Microsoft to decide to power its new browser (Edge) with Chromium. It's still doubtful I would ever start using Bing as my search engine, though I've decided that I'm glad that Bing exists. Watch out, Google: that feeling is probably one of the early Kubler Ross stages of software adoption.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190712 feedback
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