I’ve been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.

I have tried to bury memories about my life as a student, but posts like this bring it all back.

Like say for a term paper, it usually went something like this.

1. Pick from among the Prof’s suggested topics.
2. Attempt to find resources on said topic.
3. Fail at #2 and return to #1.
4. Finally find a well-covered topic and breathe a sigh of relief with 1 week to go.
5. Attend a lecture/TA session and discover to my horror that I’ve misunderstood the topic completely. Return to #1.
6. In desperation, try to find reference materials on all possible topics at once. 2 days to go.
7. Spend a day sifting through everything I’ve managed to gather hoping to find anything at all I could write 1000+ words about.
8. Final evening. Plunk down a 2L coke, heat up some Jamaican patties, and start pulling an all-nighter.

I guess for exams, there was less running around but more like #8 on repeat for a couple of weeks straight. After that, my mom calls telling me what great plans she has for Christmas. I’m usually just coming down with the flu by this point.

I have, if anything, been watching the Olympics more now than in the past. I think the change came about due to the fact that you can now stream any event at any time without commercials, annoying commentary, interviews, etc. It used to be that coverage would focus on events featuring your own nation’s top talent, which meant that some sport that interests you but doesn’t have much traction in your country gets ignored. And during a low time, rather than showing some sport where maybe your country has no medal prospects, they’d fill the time doing athlete profiles or whatever. I hated that.

But I get that there are downsides. The cost of hosting the games have spiralled out of control, the IOC has FIFA-scale corruption issues, and the war on drugs is going about as well as wars on drugs go.

One thing I have noticed with the Paris Games is that the venues are spread around a lot more across the country. The surfing was all the way over in Tahiti, which is about as far from Paris as you can get and still be on the planet. This opens the possibility that maybe one nation, let alone city, need not supply every facility anymore. Like do we really need another luge track? Just pick one that already exists.

I think with 50 acres, you should be able to do a lot to combat the urban heat island effect. I say this based on my bike commute which alternates between suburban subdivisions and trails over conservation land. The trails always feel noticeably cooler, even where there are no trees casting shade. The coolest spots do tend to be where have trees and/or water nearby, but even open fields feel cooler.

My understanding is that Russian athletes have been competing as independents, which is a different category from refugees. But apparently, they have been barred from competing in events that also include Ukrainians.

If I’m not mistaken, they have actually medalled, which is better than some countries.

Tbh nothing lowered it for me until they put me on a statin. Genetics are a bitch. But maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough diet-wise? I don’t know.

Interesting. The article suggests the car would photograph others speeding rather than reporting itself.

Personally, I don’t mind speeders so much except when they’re weaving between traffic recklessly. I do really hate tailgaters though. So a rear-facing camera maybe?

Well that’s the way it should be. If they’re selling your data, they should compensate you for that in some way. Then it becomes a personal decision as to how much it matters to you.

Ah that makes sense.

I think another thing that might be uniquely Canadian is when you’re paying at a drivethru and you see the machine emerge from the pickup window taped to the end of a hockey stick. That was a big thing during the pandemic for social distancing. I guess more recently, they’ve been moving to less improvised solutions, which is a shame. I really liked the hockey stick!

The cash I have on hand comes exclusively from playing pub gigs in a band. That is still very much a cash-driven economy where I am. When I accumulate enough, I usually wind up spending it on music gear, so I don’t think this hobby of mine is major wealth-builder. But while many businesses are moving away from cash, it seems music stores are used to people like me and still allow fairly hefty cash transactions.

The other day I was settling my tab at the pub and the guy hands me a machine. I say, I’ll pay by cash thanks. He says really?!? Dude, you literally just handed me cash for the gig tonight. Oh yeah…

Canada has universal tap to pay also, but what surprised me about the UK—at least in the London area—was how quick it was? The payment processing was near-instantaneous. In Canada, I think the machines make a phone call behind the scenes to a bank or something? There’s a significant delay before it goes through.

Yeah that sounds awesome!

I was just trying to say that once you privatize something like a mall to make it housing or whatever it is, you will never get it back. The city or some public trust should hold onto the property. What you actually do with it depends on what would be best for the community I guess?

Being a Canadian, just having some indoor places where you can gather in to get out of the cold in the dead of winter is something I don’t think we should give up.

I can’t speak for other introverts, but I think I have an overactive imagination that has to unpack everything I experience. As such, a social event gives me sensory overload from which I need some recovery time. I think we tend to be deep thinkers, and really, what’s wrong with that? I wouldn’t want it any different.

This is not to say, however, that I do not enjoy social interaction. When I was younger and less equipped to handle it, it came with a fair bit of stress, if not outright dread. Over the years, I have adapted to the point that I enjoy getting out there with people in general, though I do need that time to recuperate.

In terms of advice, I’d say try to stay in a conversation bubble but don’t feel the pressure to contribute. You don’t have to fill the air all the time. Just sit back and listen to what unfolds. Make a little venn diagram in your head over where your interests and others’ seem to coincide, and gently try to nudge conversation in that direction when prompted, but feel free to stay quiet and let others do the talking.

When it seems hopeless and you share no common ground with your company whatsoever, turn queries around and let them talk more about what they want. Say things like “How do you know so much about this?” Then they’ll go on until they’ve unloaded and say you’re awesome to talk to, and you’ve hardly done anything! I do enjoy seeing people being happy though, so it’s not like I’m not getting anything out of it.

One last piece of advice is to find some role for yourself at a social event. I sometimes play in a band, for example, and find that I love feeling that energy of people around me having a good time without the expectation of having to be actively social. You can actually be the life of the party in a safe, scripted context, which is pretty awesome. Still need that time after to unwind and get down from the stimulation high though, of course.

As a GenX, I would prefer seeing them made into some sort of public space? We are losing a lot of that, at least where I live. Indoor space in particular.

A construction bin was sitting in a bike lane in the area at the time, he said, which will be part of the police investigation.

Watching the video, it looks like the road has a cycle track with medians in sections to prevent automobiles from crossing over, but these also prevent bicycles from leaving. Normally, this would not be an issue at all, but when she was approaching the obstruction, there was only a relatively short gap where she would have to jump out into traffic to pass it. A worst-case scenario from a bike safety standpoint. This is really tragic.

It just occurred to me the only functioning CD player I have at this point may be the one in the car, while I do have a USB-equipped turntable in the closet someplace. Afaik it still functions. I had bought it in order to burn my vinyl collection to CD.

I can’t say too much about it but we’re in the mining sector.

And yeah, if I had to do it all over again from scratch, I’d definitely be looking at a real-time OS. There just weren’t many options back in the day besides coding it all yourself. Even now, I’d have to benchmark the OS to see what its latency is actually like? We had it down in the microseconds range with our custom OS but if it’s more like milliseconds with an off-the-shelf OS, for example, that would change the whole ball game.

Well we built some instrumentation around it at work back in the 90s and still use it today. It was ahead of its time. It had hardware loops, a hardware call stack, hardware circular buffer addressing, and a DMA controller. In one instruction, you could do 2 FPU operations and a memory move with a DMA transfer going on in the background. It was an insane architecture. And it could handle 3 separate memory spaces, so even though it’s a 32-bit chip, you could access well over 4 GB of RAM.

The best thing about chips of that era though is you could tell ahead of time exactly how long your code will take to execute. Like you just type numbers into a spreadsheet and add up the instruction cycle counts. That kind of analysis is hopeless these days, but it informed the design of the instrument. More recently, we’ve been looking at RISC-V for a newer generation, but it’s harder to predict ahead of time how it will perform?

Oh interesting. I tried turning off sound and now ctl-g flashes the terminal instead. (Fwiw I’m using the built-in terminal on a Mac.)