From a journal entry dated December 6, 2011, trying to remember my dreams from the most recent contemporaneous sleep period:
In a store much like Village Market trying to find ingredients for Thai food — Lemongrass, lime leaves, and something else. I later woke to find that I’d written a note to myself:
“TROLL DREAMS” Random thought – giving applause to a statue
I’m not quite sure what that means…
I don’t know if I woke from a dream within a dream and that note was in the outer dream or if I actually wrote it IRL. But I do vaguely remember thinking it stupendously funny to stand in front of a statue and give it a raucous round of applause while onlookers would pretend to go on about their business, casually unconcerned as to what task or deed the statue did to warrant such a grand reception.
Did some shoveling, got a good workout, according to the Fitbit I got 36 minutes of cardio doing so. Not too shabby! Also did some more work on dialing in some server stuff. Finally sat down and started to tinker with some regexes to get a certain something working better, don’t think I have to mention what it is exactly… But I’ll need to wait and see if any bots come by this site with a certain …intention. Yes.
No camera trickery here, this is how these unopened bottles of water, artifacts from 2009, actually look in real life.
It seems that the slow-motion time portal under my stairs distorts plastic bottles as they age. The glass jars, light-bulb, etc. don’t seem as vulnerable to this side-effect of the portal but they are susceptible to the effect of gravity when falling off the shelf, often with horrifying and tragic results.
But today is not to be “Turkey Day” at the Pambulon Heights Donut Club HQ. Unfortunately, plans to leave the Dakotaloaf region to visit relatives fell through due to unforeseen circumstances. Since there is not an *abundance of prepared food here today someone thought it a good idea to get KFC for dinner, (uhhhh-suming they are even open) a suggestion with which I concur (again, assuming they’re open).
And that got me thinking about KFC. And KFC buckets. And Buckethead.
And that reminded me about the time I was wondering about the size of Buckethead’s head. Which lead, naturally, to wondering about the size of the KFC buckets in general. Like, what is their capacity? Besides 12 pieces of chicken how much stuff can one hold? A gallon? Two gallons? So this one time a few years ago I actually.. Well, I’ll just quote myself:
Interesting info, but now I’m curious as to the volume of the actual physical bucket itself.
I called [KFC’s] 1-800 number just now and spoke to a very nice lady who must have thought I was insane asking about the dimensions of their buckets. After establishing, by route of a rather circuitous and convoluted conversation (which I shall not labor to repeat), that I was interested not in the sizes of their meals but that of their containers, she declined to answer my query as the information is apparently either unavailable or a protected trade secret. She offered to send me some other irrelevant information on the matter, perhaps to placate and stymie my curiosity, (or perhaps she thought I was engaging in corporate espionage and was fishing for my address) but I suddenly became frightened and didn’t wish to reveal my location out of an *abundance of paranoia. So I lied and, due to the sudden fear and an inability to create an otherwise plausible excuse, said I live on a submarine and wouldn’t be able to receive mail.
So now I guess that information is forever to remain a mystery…
And so I still don’t know how much a KFC bucket can hold besides Buckethead’s head and 12 pieces of chicken. Presumably not at the same time.
*The word of the day is “abundance”, as from the great cornucopia in the sky comes an abundance of stuff. And now that my internal cognitive map has been crosswired I’m able to imagine a KFC-bucket-shaped cornucopia springing forth an endless abundance of their original recipe fried chicken. Take that, Colonel Sanders!
I’d like to formally apologize to my two regular readers, Googlebot and bingbot, for the internet outage that made the Pambulon Heights Donut Club HQ inaccessible for about 6 hours yesterday.
According to /var/log/nginx/access.log the last hit to the http/s server from an external IP address before the outage was: [20/Nov/2018:12:07:41 -0600]
and the next hit was: [20/Nov/2018:18:16:10 -0600]
According to /var/log/auth.log the last hit to sshd from an external IP address was: Nov 20 12:09:15 REDACTED sshd[31648]: Disconnected from authenticating user root 122.xxx.xxx.164 port 47684 [preauth]
and the next hit was: Nov 20 18:10:13 REDACTED sshd[638]: Received disconnect from 118.xxx.xxx.142 port 56936:11: [preauth]
The cause of the outage was due to a road crew severing a fiber-optic line that provides internet service to the Pambulon Heights Donut Club HQ and the greater Dakotaloaf region.
The potato man was spotted again. Nobody got a picture this time so we don’t know if he was still in his snazzy digs but it seemed like remarkably suitable attire for such a character that I’d imagine so.
We’ll be sure to keep “keeping an eye out for him” for him.
Although this is my same bike it’s from an earlier ride somewhere near dangerous animal holes
The weather was nice yesterday so I reset the wheel size in the CatEye and redid the same there-and-back-again ride as last time. At the halfway/turn-around point I noted that the CatEye was reporting 5.45 miles, so, in theory that would make a round-trip 10.9 miles. That agrees with manually inputting the turns into google maps with the distance measuring tool. However, the Fitbit app says 10.47 whereas Strava says 10.53…
[interjection — the Fitbit is telling me I’ve been sitting for too long. Gonna go for a short walk and stretch my eyes. … And back]
GPS trackpoints cause kids to run their bikes into *fire hydrants.
…so roughly 0.4 miles unaccounted for if google maps and the halfway-measurement-from-the-CatEye-times-two are to be believed. ~3.67% distance loss seems too much for GPS errors even accounting for the GPS points cutting corners during turns. GPS track points are gathered at a certain interval and connected algorithmically sometimes resulting in “cutting corners” like this image. According to the .tcx data file the Fitbit appears to poll the GPS on the phone at one trackpoint per second:
Dadgummit! can’t get the whitespace set right with wordpress, I’ll try to fix it later… EDIT: I guess manually encasing the block with <pre>…</pre> tags does it.
One problem about this whole thing though, the CatEye stopped recording at around 7 miles. Forgot the actual number since I reset the CatEye shortly after. So it seems I’ll have get to do this little experiment again! Maybe next time I’ll see if I can find another one of those graffiti cats.
Not sure what this creature was, bigfoot perhaps if judging by the photo quality. EDIT – was probably a groundhog.
As for the ride itself, I saw this weird beaver-like creature. It was an unusual possible rodent for this area, it had a body similar to a beaver but a much smaller tail. I thought it was someone’s giant pet rabbit at first but it definitely was not that. Moved rather slowly. It took me a while to get my camera out of my pack and ready to photograph hence the terrible picture. This fella might not have been particularly fast but he was good at concealment in the brush. [EDIT – I think it may have been a groundhog.]
Also saw a daytime fox near this creature. I generally consider it somewhat auspicious to see a fox at all, let alone during the day, let alone in the day in a park where people are milling about.
Also saw this giant great dane standing in someone’s yard. Passed it on the “there” portion of the ride and again on the “back again” portion, standing in the exact same location staring in the exact same direction with the exact same regal pose. I stopped the bike about 100 yards/meters down the path and did a U-turn wondering if it was a live dog or a realistic statue, was gonna take a picture but the dog slowly turned its head and stared me down so I was like “Ok buddy, you’re real then.” Turned around and proceeded forthwith.
Finally, saw a dog that looked like a lion being walked by a lady who also looked like a lion.
When I got home I remembered to reset the Mity8 overall odometer to account for the wheel-size adjustment discrepancy. The original discrepancy was 38.25 miles but I adjusted for the ~3.87 that was missing from this ride for a total of a ~34.4 mile rollback, as indicated by this image.
*I suppose now would be a good time to mention that the red thing in the mspaint image is supposed to be a fire hydrant.
Today I’d like to spruce up the global, nay Intergalactic HQ of the Pambulon Heights Donut Club. Order of instructions:
Write this post.
Procrastinate
???
Then at some point I’ll tidy up this desk which is housing the laptop serving this, and other websites.
EDIT: This post has been written so I’ve stricken item 1.
EDIT 2: It’s about closing time and I still haven’t gotten to this today so I’ve also stricken item 2. Pretty good! I accomplished two of the three things on my list. That makes for a pretty productive day if I say so myself.
If only I knew what the third thing was supposed to be. For all I know I might have accidentally accomplished that one too.
Looks like the weather might be nice today so I’m gonna try the same bike ride I took last time again and see if resetting the wheel size on my CatEye bike computer will make it agree with the GPS distance from my phone. Pretty excited about this because, well, because I get to ride my bike!
Betcha thought it was gonna be the Queen tune. Er, unless.. unless you saw the title in which case, probably not.
When I got home I remembered to reset the Mity8 overall odometer to account for the wheel-size adjustment discrepancy. The original discrepancy was 38.25 miles but I adjusted for the ~3.87 that was missing from this ride for a total of a ~34.4 mile rollback, as indicated by this image.