It’s been too long since we had a proper fitting mattress in our bed. A combination of living in Denmark but buying our bed in Dubai meant we couldn’t until we moved to North America. Then life happened for four years….but that stops today. New mattress day. Happens once every seven years apparently.

Atlas, Rockefeller Center – New York, New York Directly across Fifth Avenue from St. Patrick’s Cathedral is this wonderful statue of Atlas. And while the statue is heroic enough, I love pointing the camera upward to include one of Rockefeller Center’s towers as a backdrop. I also like how this scene is almost like a temple to commerce directly across the street from a “temple” to religion. It’s almost as if they are competing to see which can upstage the other. Atlas is another tourist…

Nero’s Day At Disneyland – Grand Reopening Tonight’s batch of submissions leans into my regrowing enamourment with breakcore and otherwise frenetic, brainy production styles. It’s hard for me to quite trace my renewed interest in these sorts of sounds. When I was a teenager around the turn of the century, I got pretty heavy into this sort of thing, but only found myself returning to it recently. This may be a simple question of exposure — for years, when Palms Out was at its peak and I was…

A glimpse into the future. You now need to pay for T-Shirt pro to remove ads from your clothes. Some really cool, (but kind of scary) technology came out of the National University of Singapore recently. We now have touchscreen textiles. Quoting the important bit of the abstract: We integrate these fibres into the forearm portion of a garment sleeve to realize a GUI with a 96 × 54-pixel display, 30-frame-per-second refresh rate and 8-bit colour depth. It supports dynamic graphics, integrated…

Ah, Captain’s Chair. I’ve already logged my appreciation of Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi’s remapping of Imperium into the Star Trek universe. Like that series, now sadly defunct thanks to the shuttering of the board-gaming side of Osprey Games, this is an information-dense deck-builder that absolutely revels in its moreishness. Quite literally. It features more icons, more decks, and more chrome-laden rules per cubic micron than any other deck-builder I can recall. Now there’s a second-wave…

An elderly Charlie Chaplin discusses his autobiography with his editor, recounting his amazing journey from his poverty-stricken childhood to world-wide success after the ingenious invention of the Little Tramp. Oh, what a great movie! I have no idea this even existed, so the moment I learned about it, I instantly got it and watched it, and oh boy, it’s so well made! Filled with stars in great roles, it’s a great piopic. Seven popcorns and goes into the Movie Vault. To see all 21 photos, visit…

The impact of two weeks ago means that the line looks no better this week than last week, alas. This week's rolling 90 day average spending However, the week total is a lot better. $513 is a lot less than $764! Where it needs to be to get back on track. Hooray! AccountTotal Groceries280.86 Health Insurance78.60 Medical Expenses75.00 Garden Supplies29.75 Subscriptions20.00 Dining19.00 Broadband and mobile9.80 Total513.01 This is despite a monster total for Groceries. And I'm relaxed about the…

It is now 9:00 p.m. Tuesday evening as I am writing this. My cuddle session happened. She actually showed up. For once, my inner skeptic was wrong. I'm extremely relieved, but honestly, pretty shocked. Before she got here, the time she was supposed to arrive came and went. I was sure I was right and she was going to be a no-show or have an excuse for why she couldn't make it. Nope. She showed up looking fucking totally amazing. No shit. Fine, thin body, massive breasts, nice butt, pretty face,…

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this. Cat's Musings is, as of today, officially one year old. I mentioned in my 100th post, this has been my consistent and most successful blog. Technically, my first post was October 26th, but I consider Wide Open Spaces to be the true beginning of the blog. How do I measure the success of my blog? I measure it in satisfaction with my work. I'm taking a closer eye on my wordsmithing than I have in a long time. I feel I have improved in…

Ornamental Women, my Gothic Fantasy novel (available here, if you have great taste in fiction) is chock full of allusions and references by design. I fundamentally believe that good genre fiction displays the author's fixations and interests in full regalia, so it's no surprise that my book is brimming over with the things that fascinate me. Victoriana fans will be eating especially well with my novel. Below, I'm going to annotate my own text and unveil my inspirations.Spoilers follow, of…

Still strikes me as a classic example of the thing you’re being warned against looking more interesting than its alternative

You know, for a day where we did “nothing”, we actually accomplished some important things. Today was chilly and damp, so only the essentials got done outside. The girls did the morning cat feeding, as usual, and the Shrine Lady was very loud about her displeasure that warm cat soup comes AFTER the dry kibble. … Continue reading Juggling

First, a note about the web platform Using the web platform as much as possible is the most inclusive approach to building websites. The more that we use tools to abstract away the platform, the more complicated we make the job. For someone to write CSS using a framework, they still need to understand CSS. They will be able to get pretty far without understanding it, but eventually it will be needed. So, this means that both CSS and the framework must be understood. For anyone new to a project,…

I often remind myself to shake the dust, and I think why I've ritualized the act of getting rid of things is because of the holy clean. I wrote in my last post about how I have the urge to delete everything and start again, but I'm too long in the tooth to keep that pattern up. Regardless, I suppose you could say that I get my spring cleaning started earlier than most, in late October of the year before. To start again from the beginning means everything is reset to the easiest register, sure.…

For several years, I’ve done a deep dive into my own personal finances once a year. I think of it like an annual review with a financial planner. Except I don’t have a financial planner. I do the review myself. AI has become increasingly useful for helping me with this. A year or two ago, I’d write an intricate prompt that asked the LLM to role play as my financial planner doing an annual review, while I paste in details and answer questions. That general idea still works, but it’s become much…

Closer Than EverCompassion, wisdom and a big month of progress for the Tashi Project. An overdue update on taking big steps to get closer to completion.

Pumpkin muffins, a zen goalie, just doing things, and some other stuff. I'm not working this week and haven't gotten my November work shifts yet so I'm just being anxious about that. Got my covid and flu shots today and am back to masking indoors and on transit as much as possible. Had some financial stuff come up that I now have to deal with and am pissed about having to deal with. Being on benefits means even just accepting free money is complicated and hazardous. I made pumpkin muffins from…

— 1. The Hilbert transform — In this set of notes we begin the theory of singular integral operators – operators which are almost integral operators, except that their kernel just barely fails to be integrable near the diagonal . (This is in contrast to, say, fractional integral operators such as , whose kernels go to infinity at the diagonal but remain locally integrable.) These operators arise naturally in complex analysis, Fourier analysis, and also in PDE (in particular, they include the…

Here is Patrick McKenzie: I have decided since no one popularized word yet: lambda is the general factor of performance above SOTA LLM baseline. Notes: I am primarily posting this because a term for this is so useful inter- and interpersonally. Wins over replacement is a pretty good analogy for this, but the replacement-level players are becoming arbitrarily numerous and inexpensive. None of this is to say that lambda is the only way to evaluate one's skills. Organizations will use…

I joined Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and Shelly Brisbin on this week’s show to talk about our iPhone Duo impressions, reports of cracking phones, and Apple’s busy week of releases.

Location Council Bluffs, IA · map Admission $10 adults, $8 seniors/students, $5 youth (as of 2026-10) Hours Thu–Sat 10am–5pm, Sun 1pm–4pm; check the official site Visited 2026-07 Worth the drive ★★★☆☆ (3/5) Part of detour, a series on places worth leaving the highway for. 1. Overview Just across the Missouri River from Omaha, in downtown Council Bluffs, sits the Pottawattamie County Squirrel Cage Jail. It was built in 1885, held prisoners until 1969, and is the only three-story rotary jail ever…

Daring Fireball: Prestructured WYSIWYG A perfect new term (and expert description) for a beautiful idea. I avoided using Apple Notes for years. But, for the past couple of years, I’ve become a big fan and use it for all sorts of things in part because of what is described here.

Hopefully I do need to write out the reasons why PHP was a big deal last week. Thanks to the ever vigilant folks at Reclaim Hosting this blog (hosted in Reclaim Cloud) and my fleet of many other sites running it were patched. Nary a shell was cracked open. I aimed to post something positive about how much I love PHP despite it getting such a bad knock last week. All the smug folks with their static web sites were like “look at me, no PHP, no problemo.” I’d probably do the same. Hold the bus, I…

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It's interesting watching Samurai Jack and trying to figure out what the cartoon violence rules were. Famously, most of Jack's battles were with robots so the audience rarely sees blood, just oil. But even with robots: which ways are you allowed to depict them fighting? Looking at the fight between Jack and The Guardian, a few rules can be inferred. Weapon contact with Jack, when it happens, must be brief. Ripping Jack's clothes superficially is okay (this is kind of like his health bar.) If no…

Perfume PosseNot this week… I am down with the flu this week and nothing is working, nose-wise. So I am sitting here whorfing up hairballs and drinking enough tea to turn Boston Harbor brown. Or browner. I will be back next week Image: Wikimedia… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseNot this week…

I’ve had the Googlebook now for a couple of weeks, and I have gotten a chance to both use it on a regular basis, and compare it with the MacBook Air I have (it sports an M4 processor). One of the things that I was curious about is which of them I would end up using more often, and which I would prefer over the other, if indeed there was a preference at all. I’m not going to stretch this out for you: I prefer the MacBook Air over the Googlebook. This is because of a number of factors, some…

They sound like harmless conversation... except the French don't do small talk. They're trying to figure out who you are, socially. The post 5 French Questions That Are Actually a Class Audit first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.

The Gateless Gate is a collection of Zen koans, short cryptic stories, assembled by a Chinese monk in 1228. It’s one of the strangest books ever written and one of my favorites. So I gave it a modern upgrade with a fully interactive edition. This was one of the most unusual and challenging projects I […]

Waking up well before dawn, I could see a thick blanket of fog over the lake. After a quick cup of coffee I pack my small camera bag and make the short walk down the street to the Upper dam where I am treated to a most enjoyable 30 minutes of sunrise.