Playin' Fast and Loose in the Hackers' Nest

The evening of Thursday the 15^th, we had spinach and artichoke stuffed chicken breast, garlic bread, and fettuccine alfredo for dinner. And then I helped the molerat with some math homework she had, involving ratios and proportions.

I was dismayed to find that word problems haven't changed much in the 25-30 years since I had to sit through that garbage.

You know, stuff like...

We blew through the assignment quickly, which gave me some free time while Athennia was in the shower; so I took the opportunity to watch two episodes of my last birthday present that had finally arrived that afternoon...

I didn't feel like working right away when I woke up Friday morning; so I figured, why not watch an episode or two of Shoresy while I wait for my productivity to return?

Four episodes later, I was finished Season One—and now I'm stuck waiting probably another year or more until the next season comes out on DVD.

Meanwhile, when I did finally sit down to get some work done late Friday morning, I found that the audiobook project I had been mixing the night before seemed to be inexplicably corrupted: The playback was about four times too fast, and the narration was all staticky and distorted.

I initially chalked this up to the fact that I had about 800 tabs open in Firefox and 2,000-some unread articles in my news-reader. (My work machine is relatively beefy; but, even with 32 gigabytes of RAM, all that excessive multi-tasking eventually takes its toll.)

So, I closed Firefox temporarily, knowing it would just reload my session and all those tabs when I opened it again. Then I went to close my news-reader but figured I would take 5-10 minutes to wade through the headlines first and weed out the 40-60% I'd never have any interest in reading—

Given my fields of interest, I obviously read a lot of tech news as well; and a few headlines piqued my interest enough that I double-clicked them to open them...

...in Firefox.

Colossal mistake, dumbass.

...because there went my previous session—along with all 800 of those previous tabs I'd had open, going back to mid-March of last year.

So, I got to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening being pseudo-productive and digging into my rsync backups to retrieve a list of everything I'd lost... and then decoding the encoded JSON data into something I could actually make sense of... and then actually wading through 800 articles and taking notes on them in the appropriate sections of my knowledge base so that I could close them and be done with them—like I should've just taken a moment to do back whenever I first encountered each of them to begin with.

What fun!

When Athennia got home from work, she said she's basically the only one in her entire company that doesn't have COVID.

I had set out some pizza dough earlier in the day to let it thaw—planning for us to make a plain pizza for Riley and Taylor, and a sausage pizza for ourselves.

Alas, our freezer decided that now was the perfect time to be unexpectedly sausage-less :(

But, not content to settle for plain pizza, I defrosted the largest chicken breast we had on hand, sliced it up, threw on a little bit of basically everything from the spice rack, sauted it, and smothered it in a deluge of barbecue-flavored high fructose corn syrup just like God intended.

I'd more or less just been hoping I hadn't overcooked the chicken and it wouldn't be like chewing through a pair of leather boots by the time it got cooked a second time on my pizza oven as well...

But, that pizza ended up being way more awesome than it had any right to be! I'd say it was easily one of our top five of all time :)

After dinner, Athennia and I helped Taylor with her robotics class from 9:00 P.M. until just about midnight.

She's in the preliminary stages of building what will eventually be a full-fledged robot—even if, for now, it was basically just an Arduino microcontroller board and a few components from a robotics shield kit from Parallax, Inc...

First, we downloaded and compiled someone else's rudimentary C++ code and made a red LED blink.

Then we got some motors spinning.

Frankly, by the time we got the camera lens working, I was surprised that Bunnie Huang or the guys from L0pht weren't blowing up our phones to try to recruit us.

Then I asked Athennia and Taylor if they'd ever heard of an Orange Pi, and I made a little upgrade of my own...

Saturday evening, Athennia made potato, bacon, and cheddar soup for dinner. But... let the record show that I did all the veggie prep beforehand and washed all the dishes afterward ;)

Then on Sunday I was craving fast food but didn't feel like paying for it; so I asked her to whip us up some burger sliders. (Let the record show that, as far as I recall, I didn't do a damn thing to help with this meal in any capacity whatsoever... aside from eating it.)

The morning of Monday the 19^th, Athennia got harassed on her way in to work by some jackass in a black Ford F-150 who decided her 90mph on the turnpike wasn't fast enough for his liking.

He crawled up her back bumper to the point that she had no visibility with which to safely move out of his way even if she had wanted to at that point; and then he tried to block her from taking her exit and attempted to run her off the road, before she finally managed to ditch him.

Luckily she wasn't hurt, and fortunately I wasn't there—or he'd be dead and I'd be in jail right now.

Tuesday night, we decided we've just been eating way too much wholesome and healthy food this week; and so, we treated ourselves to Popeyes.

Popeyes backs up to the rear of the laundromat—which is basically a Six Flags for homeless people...

So, it was super fun when the guy in the drive-thru asked us to pull around the back of the building to wait 3-4 minutes until our order was ready.

Is it me; or does this look like every horror-movie scene where someone gets killed?

(And, like, once you finally noticed the dozens of creatures staggering toward you from the woods, you wouldn't even be sure what you were seeing: Zombies and drunk homeless people have 100% identical gaits. True story.)

Here's a picture of the Popeyes bag, purely so that my sister knows we went to Popeyes without her...

Movin' on!

Athennia's stomach started really hurting her almost immediately after she took her first bite of Popeyes (and it was still hurting when we went to bed hours later).

But, a few minutes into dinner, Taylor began repeatedly calling and texting Athennia's phone to say that she was overwhelmed with homework.

Apparently she had a whole bunch of things due—four of which would "lock" that night at midnight—which meant that she must have procrastinated over the weekend and left everything to be completed at the last minute.

We were of course in the middle of dinner, and so Athennia reasoned that getting back to Taylor could wait until we were finished eating. But then, Taylor decided to dispense with a narcissistic manipulation attempt of the variety that Athennia and I agreed we weren't going to entertain anymore...

We spent nearly two straight weeks last month getting Taylor caught up on all the classwork she claimed to have fallen behind on because of the stress of Uncle Kevin regularly coming around and harassing her, and from the whole CJ-and-Ahlina bit back in December.

But those days are in the past now, and we've since made it clear that Wednesday and Friday nights will be for family dinners and homework help when she needs it.

In the meantime, Riley needs help with her homework as well, and Athennia and I need time to ourselves, and (last but not least) Taylor needs to remember that she alone chose to run away from this household almost two years ago to pretend to be an adult... only now she is an adult—and one who doesn't live in this household.

So, there's a limit to the help we're willing and able to provide; and, at any rate, that help will be on our terms. And it will politely and appreciatively requested of us. Not demanded.

So, the moment Taylor's empty threat about "not graduating" came through, I looked at Athennia and said, "I really hope you're not even considering taking the bait on that."

And she wasn't.

And, she didn't.

But she was still in a fair amount of pain when she woke up for work Wednesday morning; so she decided to call out and spend the day in bed and not puking instead of gambling with going into work.

Then, late afternoon, she shot over to Lou's to pick up Taylor (a 25-minute round trip in the absolute worst case)... and, more than an hour later, they finally returned.

But no. It turned out that Lou had simply stopped at the Chic-fil-A around the corner and wanted Athennia and Taylor to wait at her trailer so they could help her up the steps and inside when she got home.

And 45 minutes later, she finally managed to get there—at which point they were able to take the two minutes helping her inside so they could get on their way back to me and Riley so that our family could try to enjoy a still-at-least-semi-timely dinner as well.

After some tomato soup and grilled cheese (with premium Vermont cheddar Athennia had procured for the occasion), I spent three hours helping Taylor with a bunch of algebra assignments and a quiz...

Lots of uber-riveting bullshit like,

Find the equation of the line that passes through the points (2,5) and (4,13).

So, we use \((y_2 - y_1) = m(x_2 - x_1)\) to find the line's slope (m)...

\((13 - 5) = m(4 - 2)\)
\(8 = 2m\)
\(m = 4\)

Then we pop the abscissa and the ordinate from either of the given points into the slope-intercept form \(y = mx + b\) to find the line's y-intercept value (b)...

\(5 = 4 * 2 + b\)
\(b = -3\)

And that gives us the values of m and b so that we can provide an answer in the form of an equation...

\(y = 4x - 3\)

But naturally, once we got that one correct without issue, the rest of the homework basically said, "It looks like you're totally comfortable with how to solve this sort of problem; so, go ahead and do about 24 more of the exact same thing for no reason."

Then it was onward to the quiz—which was all about absolute value expressions... meaning a bunch of graphs shaped like Vs (and upside-down Vs)—since, despite the domain including all real numbers, the absolute value operation will always reduce the range to positive numbers (or to negative numbers, if a later operation negates all the positive x-values coming out of the absolute-value expression).

Translation: Another round of lots and lots of redundant problems—where this time the goal was to rearrange things into an equation in the form

\(y = a|x - h| + k\),

where a determines the slope and the orientation of the graph, h shifts the graph left or right depending on its sign, k shifts the graph up or down, and the coordinate (h,k) marks the graph's vertex.

It was a real riddle of the sphinx, to be sure...

...but we aced that little bastard just the same.

And, as a bonus, I got to teach Taylor where the vertical-pipe symbol  (Shift + \) is on a computer keyboard.

I'd say that this was arguably the most important thing she took away from our tutoring session.

Since math had eaten up the entire evening, Taylor asked if she could come over again tomorrow night—which Athennia and I both said would be fine.

But... meanwhile, Athennia's stomach had really been acting up again all evening; and so, just before 11:00 P.M. when we got back from taking Taylor home, Athennia preemptively called out of work again for the next day as well :(

Thursday morning, my mom came over to drop off a birthday card she had offered to pick up for us for my cousin's party on Saturday.

And we had some bagels on-hand; so Athennia and I asked her to stay and join us for breakfast (though Athennia wasn't ready to chance putting anything in her stomach just yet).

Kitten took it easy the rest of the morning and afternoon while I got some writing done; and then, as it got close to dinner time, she surprised me by announcing that she didn't have anything in mind for dinner... so, why didn't we just do Domino's again?

Thus...

RILEY—PICTURE TIME!

Athennia felt fine all evening while she helped Taylor with her manufacturing class—and then later as she and I watched three episodes of Vikings before bed as well.

It seemed as though she would be A-okay to return to work tomorrow...

...at least, if not for the fact that she had requested Friday off back at the beginning of the week, so that she could take Taylor to the DMV to get her state ID (and then to help her try once again to make the phone call to sort out her health insurance).

Somehow, they managed to be in and out of the DMV inside of 45 minutes—which I speculated will mean that someone's head is going to roll there, for sure...

For Riley's part, she managed to make decent progress pulling her grades back up; and so, we had no problem letting her sleep over at her friend Kassie's Friday night (since they had tentative plans to go to Funzilla on Saturday).

The DMV schmucks must've got on the horn to the insurance guys to let them know about Athennia and Taylor's cakewalk at the DMV though, because that ended up being a long and grueling phone call that more than made up for the ease and painlessness of getting Taylor's ID.

By the time they emerged victorious, Athennia called and asked me, why didn't she and Taylor just go grab Qdoba for the three of us?

Heh. Just kidding.

Taylor didn't have much schoolwork left to complete at this point; so, we made it an early night with her and took her home shortly after dinner... leaving ourselves with a rare kid-less evening—albeit one which we were too burned out to make any decent use of.

So, we just binged a few episodes of Vikings before calling it a night ourselves as well.

Another eventful high-octane Friday night for the record books!