Those who stand against the arc of the universe as it bends towards justice need to get out of the way, or be consigned to the dustbin of history. An important victory was scored today, hard won and long overdue. Yet another wrong against the equality of all people was righted today. Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we fight. We fight for the LGBTQ youth who are more likely than their straight peers to attempt suicide, who are disowned by their families for who they are, who are forced out on the streets.
#ServAdv: b/d, there is no #A train service b/t 168 St and 207 St, due to a police investigation of a customer injury at 181 St.
— NYCT Subway (@NYCTSubway) May 8, 2015 I was on the way home from wandering around downtown tonight, and I got on the A train heading uptown from 42nd Street. It was late enough I got a seat, so I was happily sitting there reading a book, not paying attention.
Many many moons ago while in college a friend of mine introduced me to the author Terry Pratchett and his glorious Discworld series. I always recommended the series to friends, but with the gentle warning: "Buy one book, and you'll end up buying them all." Sir Terry died today at the age of 66. Many people have called him fantasy's Douglas Adams, and I'd wholeheartedly agree, although, while a fan of Adams, I always enjoyed Pratchett's writing and humor more.
It's not the first time I've had to use my drill-sergeant voice on the subway, but it is the first time I got an entire subway car full of people to give me a round of applause (and to have someone give me $20 for my effort). I was coming home tonight from work, and got on the uptown A train at Columbus Circle. It wasn't packed, but it was decently full, so I stood near the end by one of the standing poles.
Tonight's culinary experiment was a success. Last week needing buttermilk for some biscuits but not finding any at the local grocery, I grabbed a quart of kefir — figuring that one slighty fermented milk drink was close enough to another to work out just fine † Tonight I wanted to make some cornbread, and instead of the cup of milk the recipe called for, I used some kefir instead. The difference was subtle, but pretty good.
Invented last night in a fit of inspiration. 1 oz rye 1 oz lemon juice 1/2 oz St. Germaine 2 dashes orange bitters 3 maraschino cherries Seltzer Stir together the first four ingredients in a rocks glass. Add a large ice cube, fill the glass with seltzer and stir. Garnish with the cherries.
Some day I'm going to document how I write Salt Stack states to allow for several instances of a service to be written. But so I don't forget about it, this is a large setup that uses several techniques I'll find useful.
As part of my process to replace the power-hungry eight-year old server I have at home with a tiny Intel NUC, I'm slowly moving any real services off of it onto my colocated machine. The last real service I'm running at home is my backup machine, which handles both my AFS cell backups and my rsync-based machine backup scripts. Moving the backup server to colocation isn't difficult, but I need to find a place to stash the second, disaster-recovery copy of all of my backups.
I've been having a lot of fun with Go recently, and my usual first project when playing with a new language is to port remctl bindings to it. In doing that with Go, I ran across a problem that had me puzzled for a while until I finally figured it out. In the remctl C binding there's a call remctl_commandv(struct remctl *r, const struct iovec *iov, size_t count); e.g. you pass remctl_commandv an array of iovec pointers and a count for how long that array is.
Snow in Inwood