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mdlbearToday I am thankful for...
mdlbearNot a bad week. The housemates returned from OVFF Wednesday morning, so I'm off the hook for taking care of Cricket and Brooklyn. So I'm back to caring for two cats in one room again. And I was fairly productive -- not much music but a lot of work on the HyperSpace Express website, and N's author site. Which should have been done a month or more ago, but better late than not at all.
I wrote a post yesterday that wasn't one of the usual repeating ones (Thankful Thursday, Done Since, and Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit). It's been a while since I did that.
Only four walks this week :P -- I woke up with a leg cramp yesterday; the other two missing mornings were a matter of timing. See above about Wednesday. I think Monday I just slept in. Or fell down a rabbit hole. So far the main thing the Sansung smartwatch is good for is tracking my sleep. The main reason I got it in the first place was for emergency calls, but I haven't tested that function -- or even ordinary calling -- at all. Should fix that.
I also haven't made a portfolio/list of all the websites I've build over the years. I'm not even sure how many there are. Need to fix that too.
mdlbearToday is the first of November, Samhain, and the Day of the Dead. The veils between the worlds are thinner now than most times, and it's a good time to honor the ones I have lost.
I don't have much to say, beyond thanking you for having been part of my life, however long or briefly that may have been. My daughter Amethyst Rose, stillborn in 1990; my mother-in-law Shirley Hentzell and my father Abraham Savitzky, who died less than two weeks apart in 1999; my mother Lynn Savitzky, who died in 2020 two months before her hundredth birthday; my dear wife Colleen, who left us in 2021.
And let's not forget our cats: Curio, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge a decade ago; and Desti, our pocket panther, who followed him in 2023.
I miss you all. I love you still.
mdlbearWelcome to November, 2025!
It's the Day of the Dead; here's wishing good memories to those who observe it.
mdlbearToday I am thankful for...
jesse_the_kRobert Bringhurst's remarkable reference work, The Elements of Typographic Style, provides a full semester of type history in less than 400 pages. It's not just the book's elegant design nor well-chosen exemplars that so thrilled me I read both the 2nd and 3rd edition, dropping more than 50 stickies along the way. The current edition, version 4.3, is out of print and still focuses exclusively on printed material.
Bringhurst is a poet and translator. That last vocation has brought him into regular contact with non-Latin alphabets, and the Elements of Typographic Style provides the best advice I've ever seen in English regarding how to set type with accents, diacritics, and other "analphabetic characters."
( Archived links )
I drafted this review a decade ago, and I still believe it, so it’s a proof of life post.
mdlbearA better week than I was expecting? N, G, and m are at OVFF, and I'm left here with the cats (modulo the housekeeper on Saturday mornings, and j on the weekends), but it's been magageable, and not too lonely. (I'm usually somewhat isolated down here on the ground floor anyway.) The main extra work was the two extra litter boxen, and feeding Brooklyn (who I swear is part hobbit -- four meals a day). (Cricket eats only kibble, so it's just a matter of making sure her bin stays filled.)
Also, I've taken six walks (though none longer than .7km), ordered some of my favorite groceries (including fish-other-than-salmon and bread-other-than-plain), and gotten a fair amount of work done on the HyperSpace Express website. In particular, the Books page, from which you can find out where to get N's book, The World As It Ought to Be, and subscribe to her newsletter.
And I have somehow managed to log a two-year streak in Duolingo. For what that's worth. Lately that hasn't been much.
I have gotten somewhat less done yesterday and today, because OVFF over Zoom.
Those of us with hidden disabilities may be interested in the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower Official website Disabilities index, search (The list is extensive.)
For those of us who couldn't get to OVFF, here are the 2025 Pegasus Award winners:
Best Villain Song: "The Evil Eyeball," Sibylle Machat
Best Hero Song: "The Ones Who Walked Away," Beth Kinderman
Best Performer: The Blibbering Humdingers
Best Writer/Composer: Eric Distad
Best Classic Filk Song: "Merry Meet," Steve Macdonald
Best Filk Song: "One Small Boat," Marilisa Valtazanou
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dw_maintenanceGood morning, afternoon, and evening!
We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)
I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.
Ta for now!
mdlbear - Thankful Thursdaymdlbear - Done Since 2025-10-26mdlbear - River: Day of the Deadmdlbear - "Rabbit rabbit rabbit!"boxofdelights - Halloweenmdlbear - Thankful Thursdayjesse_the_k - rave: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurstmdlbear - Done Since 2025-10-19mark in dw_maintenance - Database maintenancetimeasmymeasure
