Jessamyn Smith

Hello, welcome to Women's History Month, which started last Sunday, and International Women's Day, which is today. See also, EFF: Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Five Women In Tech That EFF Admires

Not a great week, but on the whole not too bad. Next week will either be pretty good, or a disaster, depending. See below.

There was also the little matter of my monthly pension deposit not arriving, because the address confirmation mail they sent was busy chasing me across two continents. Blarg, but sorted out now. Good thing I'm on a new blood pressure prescription. Which has not been delivered, but fortunately I have enough to get me through the week.

I have spent the entire week worrying about my impending trip to Seattle on Tuesday (coming back a week from yesterday). In addition to worrying about the possibility of getting sick in a country without good health insurance, and other problems it might be best not to mention in public right now, there's the fact that my nice new Travelpro suitcase is 5cm too wide to fit Delta's carry-on requirements. So I'll have to check it. Fortunately my meds all fit in my (old) CPAP case, under the (new) CPAP.

I'll be taking the new Framework 12 laptop. First time traveling with it, so we'll see. There's a lot of state on my Thinkpad, including way too many open tabs in Firefox. Things may be a trifle inconvenient for a while.

We're getting a new scooter tomorrow; Lizzy goes into the shop on Wednesday, and apparently Scarlett is still being worked on.

Linkies: Guide to U.S. Expat Taxes in the Netherlands | H&R Block; HoS qul (The Fire is Strong) | Klingon Warpgrass (Lyric Video) - YouTube, Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis': Milestone in science fiction film,

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• Being in what the medical people I've spoken to lately say is reasonably good health for my age. My blood pressure has responded well to my latest prescription (10mg/day of lisinopril). But walking more than .75km hurts, and I am NOT thankful for that.
• Ginger, garlic, chocolate, and coffee. And other tasty things too numerous to mention.
• Free faxing with Dropbox.
• My mail finally catching up with me. (Too late to prevent problems, but hopefully not too late to prevent disaster.)
• My support groups.

Not a very good week. Lots of anxiety -- my impending trip to Seattle, income tax, events in the world, and phone calls to repair places. We got (scooter)Lizzy back from getting her flat tire repaired, but now she has an electrical problem and won't go. We were supposed to get Scarlett-the-carlet back this week, but she still has an electrical problem. I need to make another call about Lizzy. Tomorrow.

On the other hand, I did go for a walk six days out of seven this week. It's better than usual, and about time. The only way I can do it appears to be going out before breakfast. Any later and I run into deliveries and appointments.

Substack is using Persona for age verification -- that's the same one that exposed 700,000 Discord users' data a while back. So has LinkedIn. There are plenty of good alternatives to Substack -- you're reading one right now. Discord is another matter, but people are looking. In either case, moving a community never goes well.

I've ordered a copy of "The Magic of Code" by Samuel Arbesman. See also, The World Inside the Crystal. I started working on a book based on that idea, a long time ago.

If you're an Emacs user you might want to look at This bad -- it says so on the tin -- version of emacs implemented purely from Unix shell commands I'm not sure I would advise it. If you're a web developer, you definitely shouldn't look at this 8086 emulation written entirely in CSS and HTML5. There are some things...

If you're into sewing, you definitely should take a look at FreeSewing, a collection of free parametric sewing patterns.

( Notes & links, as usual )