Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   because we're married
Friday, May 22 2015
I spent a bit more of the afternoon than I expected to trying to do stuff in the world of Amazon Web Services. Because of a recent possible security breach, there has been a cargo-cult-like push to address absolutely every item produced by an automated scan run by a security firm, even for items where there is no conceivable way it could have facilited a breach. This was how I came to spend some hours with a big important site offline while I tried to upgrade its PHP from 5.3 to 5.6. In the end, I couldn't manage to do it because of an error related to something called "MPM," (multi-processing model) which I'd never encountered before today.
This evening, Gretchen made a sort of chowder soup containing potatoes, broccoli, a little garden-fresh asparagus, and fire-roased whole corn blend, a new Del Monte product I'd found at Hannaford the other day. Whenever I hear the word "chowder" I think of my mother. She was from the Boston area, which is famously famous for its chowders, and she even made clam chowder on occasion. I don't remember liking that anywhere as much as I liked the vegan vaguely Thai-influenced version Gretchen made tonight. All that really comes to me when I think of my mother these days is her expression, "Ahw f'Christ's sake!"
This evening, for the first time in years, Gretchen and I ("because we're married") played a few rounds of Big Boggle followed by a round of Scrabble. As always, Gretchen was significantly better than me at Boggle. I'm terrible with timed games; I tend to let my eyes wander around and obsess on irrelevant things while the sand in the hourglass drains away. Gretchen is much more pragmatic about the clock, and of course she has a great deal more visual experience with words splayed out in grids. I did, however, succeed in beating her at Scrabble, where the luck happened to be leaning in my favor. My biggest play of the game got me 41 points when I dropped an "X" tile on a double-word-score square that gave me both "OX" and "AX" (part of the play also gave me "FA," one of the many dubious two-letter Scrabble words). Oddly, for both of us, the early tiles we pulled form the bag were too consonant-rich, whereas later in the game we were plagued by long runs of vowels.
As we played, we listened to a couple albums by the band Trampled By Turtles, a new favorite of Gretchen's. They're a mostly-acoustic "post Bluegrass" sort of band. We'd tried to play a CD on the living room CD player (an old CD drive from a computer, the kind with a play button), but that had apparently died since the last time we'd used it maybe four years ago. So we had to play it on Gretchen's computer (which has an intact optical drive). Later I even got the Bluetooth equipment working well enough to ventriloquize the audio from the computer over to the stereo. Who needs a CD player when you can do that?


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?150522

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