dave bonner @rascalking@octodon.social

i'm very sorry to report that the "tactical spork" i bought off amazon is, in fact, fairly crap at being used to eat cereal.

un fucking believable. requested a refund, went and repurchased, and i'm still getting a 0 byte file when i try to download the epub.

fuck this noise, getting another refund and buying someplace else.

*sigh*

after 45 minutes and consulting with "a specialist", they've suggested I request a refund and then repurchase the book.

which, of course, they can't do for me. i have to fill out another form and wait for someone else to do it.

trying very very hard not to lose my shit with this poor tier-1 google books support person, but the script they have her running is maddening.

bought a book. the epub download link gives me a 0 byte file no matter where or on which browser i try to download. i've now been on chat support for a half hour and she's asking me if i've tried downloading it again to see if i get the same result.

it is 2017 and i'm stuck on an email thread where college professors and TAs don't know enough not to reply-all.

twenty. seventeen.

college. professors.

got stuck for 40 minutes waiting on a side street for a motorcycle parade to pass, will trying to take my daughter to a birthday party. finally home, trying to figure out some way to work the frustration and anger out of my system before I head back out to pick her up.

looking forward to this one.

MLTalks: Reinventing criminal justice, via @medialab https://www.media.mit.edu/events/adam-foss/

moving a very old py26 service to a new box. it's one of a series, and i've been updating them to py34 as i go. but this one uses tornado.database to hit a mysql server, and that's no longer a thing.

the replacement libraries are all async. none of the existing code is async, which explains why it's been slow and shitty under load at times. i really didn't want to have to do a refactor or rewrite, but now that i know why it's been crappy, i kinda have no choice.

it's funny, isn't it, how newsletters that stores send you after you buy something from them are *just* long enough that you have to click the "full email" link in gmail/inbox to get to the unsubscribe link in the footer.

it seems I must once again learn that Google mean it when they say not to install the Android beta on your day to day phone.

everything crashes. everything. all the time.

oh well, at least I didn't bother to take a whole device backup first!

anyone used duolingo to learn a language new to them? did it stick well enough to use elsewhere?

i've been using it to get me back up to speed on my lost german, and as a refresher, it's fantastic. but i'm also trying to learn italian from scratch, and i'm worried my test-taker tricks (eliminate the obviously wrong options, etc) are helping me get the answers right without really learning it.

there's nothing like reading through production python code and finding where they use exec and eval to load in a module and run a method whose names they get at runtime.

folks, python has some pretty amazing introspection capabilities that let you do this without opening a max-max-truck-sized security hole.

*checks history on this file*

yes, even in python 2.6, you could still avoid eval/exec.

found on the birdsite: https://dev.to/dbottillo/kotlin-by-examples-class-and-properties

shit. now i'mma have to knock out another android app to try the new language. #io17